While survivalist and TV star Bear Grylls has made once-in-a-lifetime adventures come true for numerous celebrities and public figures, he recently fulfilled one of his own greatest dreams: to get baptized in the Jordan River.
“It had always been a dream of mine to get in the water that Jesus was baptized in by my hero John the Baptist,” wrote Grylls.
“The story is so amazing, & it seems wherever Jesus went, that new birth, new life, a new vision followed. Luke (in the bible) was probably a Syrian doctor before he met Jesus. He writes a reliable, poignant account of his life. It’s short I like it,” he added.
Since Grylls posted the sacred event featuring a photo of himself standing in the river, it has received over 361,000 views.
It’s not the first time Grylls has shared thoughts and feelings about his faith.
While he said that his faith is an extremely important part of his life, he lamented that the whole idea of Christianity has been “tarnished” in modern life.
“As I kid, I had a really natural faith, I always believed in some higher power, I could feel there was something around and then I went to school, and we all had to go church and they all wore white cassocks and spoke Latin,” Grylls recalled. “It’s been a life journey to unwind all of that and realize that actually the little me had it right.”
“Faith is in your heart, knowing that you are not alone,” he continued. “There’s something bigger than us out there and therefore that power is for us and not against us and despite my doubts, I’m going to put my trust in that and try to have love at the center of all we do, and live empowered and go for things and not be driven by fear.”
“I think Jesus would really struggle with 99 percent of churches nowadays,” he said. “Our job in life is to stay close to Christ and drop the religious, drop the fluff, drop the church if you need to because that means so many different things to different people anyway. Keep the bit of church which is about community and friends and honesty and faith and love. All the masks, performances, music and worship bands and all of that sort of stuff—I don’t think Christ would recognize a lot of that.”
“It’s a sign of great strength to need Jesus,” he said, noting that as a young boy, faith came naturally to him, describing it as “a simple comfort, unquestioning and personal.”
Yet as he grew up, he said he found faith “tedious, judgmental, boring and irrelevant.”
It wasn’t until the death of his godfather that he said he rediscovered his relationship with God.
“God, if you’re like you were when I used to know you, will you be that again? Comfort me,” he prayed at the time.
“My faith is about being held, comforted, forgiven, strengthened and loved. Faith in Christ has been the great empowering presence in my life, helping me walk strong when so often I feel weak,” he shared.
“If I had to sum up the secret of my survival in four words,” he wrote, “it would be a combination of heart, hope, doggedness and faith.”
