{"id":1131,"date":"2008-11-16T17:40:29","date_gmt":"2008-11-16T17:40:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comedykings.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php\/christianity-for-beginners\/"},"modified":"2025-10-11T21:36:40","modified_gmt":"2025-10-11T20:36:40","slug":"christianity-for-beginners","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/comedykings.co.uk\/index.php\/christianity-for-beginners\/","title":{"rendered":"Christianity for Beginners"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\" \"\"<\/p>\n

The duo explain their Christian faith, including why it is so important to them.<\/p>\n

Published by Hodder and Stoughton Religious; 1996; ISBN: 034062146X<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"Contents<\/h2>\n

Introduction
\n1. Is God Real?
\n2. Is the Bible True?
\n3. Who Is Jesus?
\n4. Why Come to God?
\n5. Coming to God
\n6. Growing as a Christian
\n7. Spiritual Warfare
\nEpilogue<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
\n

\"\"Acknowledgments<\/h2>\n

We would like to thank the following people for their help and consideration while we were writing this book.<\/p>\n

Tommy: I would like to thank my wife, Hazel, and my children, Kelly and Zoe, for their patience and understanding.<\/p>\n

Bobby: I would like to thank Barry Pettifer, Chris Gidney, Dave Bennent and Ray Bevan for their fellowship and love over the years. And last but certainly not least, my wife Yvonne, for understanding when I didn\u2019t lie around the swimming pool with her when we were in America!<\/p>\n

Thank you.<\/p>\n

Tommy Cannon and Bobby Ball.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
\n

\"\"Introduction<\/h2>\n

Dear friend,<\/p>\n

We believe that becoming a Christian, or starting to get to know God, means taking a series of steps. The good news is that by reading this book, you may well have taken one of them! We need to make it clear, though, that just reading this book will not automatically make you a Christian. One of the steps is starting to think seriously about God, and we hope this book will help. We won\u2019t underestimate God!<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t want you to think that because we have written a book about Christianity, we were always spiritual people. Oh, no! And we emphasise that! We were two of the least spiritual people you could never wish to meet.<\/p>\n

Bobby: (I am the small, good-looking one with the moustache.) I lived a life that was full of pain, greed, lust and selfishness. I lived life just to satisfy me. I didn\u2019t care about anybody else but myself. That\u2019s how I lived until one day a man told me something was missing from my life, and that was Jesus Christ. I thought he was crazy, but somewhere deep down inside, I knew he had spoken the truth. To cut a long story short, from that moment, I started to search for Jesus and I found him. The strange thing was that he had been waiting for me all the time. I was just too caught up in myself to realise it. From that day, he came to live with me and my life changed completely. Now I can\u2019t imagine how I ever lived without him.<\/p>\n

Tommy: (Ignore what Bobby says about him being good-looking, because I\u2019m the good-looking one.) Not only that, I\u2019m taller than him. God meets people in many different ways. In Bobby\u2019s case, he had an empty feeling inside himself for months, a feeling that something was missing from his life. But in my case, it seemed that suddenly I realised I needed Jesus, and just gave my life to him. Looking back now, I can see that God sort of romanced me. He slowly worked his way into my heart. I saw the difference in Bobby\u2019s life, and I saw Christians around me living lives that seemed fulfilled, and then almost before I knew it, boom!\u2014God came into my life and totally changed it.<\/p>\n

After we became Christians, we read many books. Some were wonderful and inspirational and spoke about Jesus with a clear and spiritual message. But there are a lot of religious books about that you need a degree in theology to understand. And not everyone has got a degree in theology! So we decided to write a book about God and about Christianity that wasn\u2019t too theological. We had to ask ourselves some tough questions before we became Christians, and our book tries to answer some of them.<\/p>\n

The first three chapters try to sort out some problems about God, the Bible and Jesus. We believe you can trust what rhe Bible says about God and his Son\/Jesus, but many people just dismiss it all as fairytales. Often that\u2019s because they don\u2019t know what the-Bible says. Nearly all of what we want to say is based on the Bible, and we quote it a lot. We want to suggest here that you look up the passages we quote in a good modern translation of the Bible \u2014 one without too many \u2018thees\u2019 and \u2018thous\u2019! We use the New International Version (NIV), and we put all the references in brackets. If you don\u2019t know where to find a passage in the Bible, there\u2019s a contents page after the preface and before Genesis. But remember there are several books called \u2018John*! In each book, all the chapters are numbered, and the verses are numbered within the chapters. So \u2018John 3:16\u2019 means the Gospel of John, chapter 3 and verse 16. You\u2019ll get used to it after a while, and we hope you\u2019ll enjoy looking at what the Bible really says.<\/p>\n

The next chapters ask why we should look for God, and why we don\u2019t bother to. And then we look at what faith is. Next and most important, we talk about the steps you can take to become a Christian, and how you can live a fulfilled life with God. Being a Christian isn\u2019t always easy, but we believe God has got a great sense of humour. You don\u2019t have to be all straight and serious when you\u2019re a Christian. We\u2019ve put some jokes in because that\u2019s what we\u2019re good at, and because we think God is the sort of person who likes people to be happy. He created laughter, and there\u2019s joy in heaven when people become Christians (Luke 15:7).<\/p>\n

So read on, dear friend. We hope you enjoy the book and learn something from it that you can use in your life. Our prayers and thoughts are with you.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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