Instinct and obedience to God

As a child I believed in God with the effortless sincerity of all children. His existence was a basic fact of life affirmed by everyone who loved and cared about me. He was real, Jesus died for our sins, everybody knew that. Matters of divine power, absolute morality, and the afterlife were taken for granted among my grade-school peers in our leafy suburb. Despite being a precocious and independent-minded child I never found reason to seriously question the religion handed to me.My early unexamined faith was a product of my familial and social environment, not of any institution. The various churches of my childhood failed utterly to inspire a sense of the divine or the sacred within me. The quaint local chapel, the booming megachurch with stadium seating, the proudly non-denominational suburban cookie-cutter affair — these were temples to tedium, and, as I got old older, social awkwardness. But not faith. I did not feel the movement of the spirit in the songs we sang or the rambling…