They are still in circulation, all these years later. I remember young, earnest, long-haired converts to Christianity passing out these tracts at the beach when I was a teenager in Santa Cruz, California. The Four Spiritual Laws were created by Campus Crusade for Christ, an evangelical group, as a way of boiling the religion down to a simple formula: 1.) God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life. 2.) Man is sinful and separated from God. Therefore, he cannot know and experience God's love and plan for his life. 3.) Jesus Christ is God's only provision for man's sin. Through Him you can know and experience God's love and plan for your life. 4.) We must individually receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord; then we can know and experience God's love and plan for our lives.
There are serious flaws in these “Spiritual Laws”. They present a negative view of human nature, and a chauvinistic, dogmatic kind of religion. They beg questions that the tract can’t answer. If “man” is so sinful and separated from God, how can “man” know anything of God through Jesus, either? If God has a plan for your life, why hasn’t God shown it to you already? Does it make any sense to claim that Jesus is the only way to God, when clearly so many other people have found God through other religions?
There must be equally simple ways to express a humbler, kinder Christianity. So I offer an alternative:
The Four Spiritual Awes
1.) Awe for freedom. God’s awesome love enables you to choose your life’s plan for yourself. Through prayerful communion with God, and in soulful service to others, trust that you will find the meaning and purpose of your existence.
2.) Awe for divinity. You are born in the awesome image of God, who is love. Your failings are reminders to return to your divine nature which, like all people, you so easily forget.
3.) Awe for the journey. There are many paths that can help you
remember your divine nature, and following Jesus Christ is one of them. The path of Jesus can be hard; it’s not easy
to love even your enemies, as he did. But it is an awesome challenge that is supremely worth your life.
4.) Awe for growth. Both individually and collectively, God calls us to ever-more awesome expressions of compassion and spiritual awareness.
The one thing I’ve always admired about the original “Four Spiritual Laws” tract is its circle diagram illustrating the principle of putting God at the center of our lives. The tract showed a circle with the word SELF emblazoned in the middle, with a little cross next to the circle. The next image is of a circle with a big cross in it, with the word “self” in smaller letters next to it inside the circle. The message: put Christ at the center of your life, instead of your self, and you’ll experience a better life on this earth and salvation in the next.
I’d draw the diagram somewhat differently than the original one in the tract. I'd replace the cross image with the word "God". This might serve as a straightforward description of the common goal of all the world’s great religions. We are most human, most divine, and most fulfilled when we empty ourselves of our selves and let God be at our center, overwhelming us with awe and compassion.
There are more spiritual awes than four, I’m sure. But perhaps these are enough to get us started on the path to discovering the rest of them!