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| We have now looked at three issues, the problem of false teachers, the question of authority, and the nature of the Gospel. We come now to the question that from a personal and individual angle is the most pressing and important of all ...
WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN?
One reason for needing to know the answer to this question is that we might be clear about our own personal position. If we do not know what a Christian really is we may either be in a state of uncertainty and doubt about our own salvation or we may be deceiving ourselves with a false sense of assurance about the true state of our relationship with God. This is particularly easy when there are so many different and differing ideas of what makes a person a Christian, and yet John writes, "These things I have written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God, that ye may know that ye have eternal life" (1 John 5:13).
Another reason why we need to know the answer to our question is this. There can only be Christian unity between those who are actually Christians, and between churches that preach the biblical Gospel and have a true view of what makes a person a Christian. Admittedly, only the Lord knows infallibly those who are His (2 Timothy 2:19), and we should never forget that, but there are biblical signs that should characterise the lives of those who claim to be His.
Both these reasons bring out the importance of the earlier questions we have considered in this series. Have false teachers led us astray? Are we looking in the right place for an answer? Are we seeing what the Bible says, or are we being influenced by tradition as well? May our answer simply come from human reasoning? Unless it is the Gospel to which we are responding we can never get the answer right, so we must discern the difference between the good news God Himself has given and the distortions of that good news that are to be rejected.
Just think for a moment of some common answers to the question we are considering. A Christian, some think, is a nice, kind, good person, so anyone like that must be a Christian. Well, a Christian certainly should be like that, but others can appear nice, kind, and good who would certainly not want to be called Christians. That can't be the answer.
Try another. A Christian is someone who believes in God. That's true, but James tells us that the devils believe in God, so that doesn't get us much further. In any case we would need a definition of the God in whom we claim to believe to know whether faith is directed towards the one true and living God or to an idol of our own devising.
There are those who would say that a Christian is someone who believes in Jesus, and who believes what the Bible says about Him. Certainly a Christian does these things, and yet they don't necessarily mean a person is a Christian. We can accept truth intellectually with our minds without it making any difference at all to our lives.
Is a Christian, then, someone who prays to God? Yes, a Christian does pray to God, and a person's claim to be a Christian is suspect where there isn't any prayer. Yet millions of people claim to pray to God who are proud to belong to other faiths and would be most indignant to be called Christians. Prayer on its own is not an evidence of being a Christian.
A popular answer in some denominations is that it is baptism that makes a person a Christian, whether as an infant by sprinkling or as an adult by immersion, or at other times and by other methods. This is the conviction of the Church of Rome, the Orthodox Churches, and many in the Anglican Communion, and is a vital point in relation to the ecumenical movement. On the assumption that all who are baptised in the name of the Trinity and by water are united with our Lord Jesus Christ it is said that we should regard all baptised people as our brothers and sisters in Christ.
This rests on the doctrine of baptismal regeneration, the idea that in baptism the Holy Spirit
makes a fundamental change in a person's spiritual standing. Is anyone, though, infant or otherwise, actually born again because they have been baptised? Baptism is important as a mark of a person who is a Christian, but not all baptised people display the characteristics of a born again person.
If none of the above answers is satisfactory what do we find in the Scripture to help us? Put at its most simple, the Christian is a person who is trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ alone for his or her salvation, the forgiveness of sin and the gift of eternal life. What this involves, however, needs to be developed in more detail.
1. The Christian knows the truth about God. He may not arrive at this truth immediately, but at some point in his becoming a Christian it comes home to him, that God is holy. The description of Isaiah's call in Isaiah 6 makes this point in a vivid manner. Isaiah is convicted of his sin when faced with the holiness of God. Scripture teaches that God requires perfect obedience from man, inwardly as well as outwardly. He is concerned with the heart as well as our outward actions. As life is promised in the Old Testament to all who keep His law so He warns of judgement coming on the disobedient. "The soul that sinneth, it shall die" (Ezekiel 18:20). No one can truly be a Christian who does not know about the holiness of God.
2. The Christian knows the truth about himself. A Christian is not fooled about his own state by nature. The Holy Spirit will have convicted him of his sin. The degree of conviction will vary from person to person, but no Christian will argue with Paul's declaration that "all have sinned and come short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). He knows he is a sinner by nature and act, deserving of God's wrath. He knows as well that he can do nothing of himself to avert that wrath, and that he cannot be saved by good works, however many they might seem to be. There is nothing he can do, offer, or produce in evidence to establish any claim on God's merry. Left to answer for himself he knows that he must perish, and perish justly.
3. The Christian knows the truth about the Lord Jesus Christ. The Christian is a person who has come to understand that deity and humanity exist in the same Person, that Jesus Christ is both God and man. At the same time the Christian knows that God the Father, because of His love for the world, has sent God the Son to carry out a specific purpose that no-one else can fulfil, to save sinners.
The Lord Jesus provides for sinners that which they lack in themselves, that is, a perfect righteousness. He has also made atonement for their sin. "In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins" (1 John 4:9,10). "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them" (2 Corinthians 5:19). "For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God" (1 Peter 3:18). The Christian is one who believes that through the Lord Jesus his sin has been fully dealt with and he has been brought into God's family.
The Christian, therefore, sees in the Lord Jesus the grace, the undeserved favour of God, towards sinners. He sees what it is that the Saviour has done. He has paid the debt that we could never have paid. The Christian believes too that the Lord Jesus has been raised from the dead and is alive for ever, occupying the place of honour and glory with His Father, As a consequence "he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them (Hebrews 7:25).
The Christian is a person who knows that people receive the gift of eternal life through receiving the Lord Jesus. "He that hath the Son hath life" (1 John 5:12). "For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord" (Romans 6:23).
All these things the Christian knows, but it has to be said that he may have known them, indeed he had to know them in some measure, before he became a Christian. In other words it is possible to know them without being saved, without becoming a Christian. So there is a fourth and all-important fact about the Christian.
4. The Christian has responded with faith to the truth he knows. Faith is the crux, the crossing of the line, the evidence of God's work in the soul. No one can become a Christian without that. Think of the Lord Jesus saying to the man with the withered hand, "Stretch forth thy hand" (Luke 6:10). It was impossible for him to do that, and yet he did it because the power of the Lord accompanied the command and the man responded in obedient faith. At an even higher level, stand in your imagination outside the tomb of Lazarus. He has been dead for four days, yet the Lord Jesus cries with a loud voice, "Lazarus, come forth" (John 11:43) and he responds. The dead man lives again. The power of the Lord in the command produces life and obedience.
Surely it is this same power that accompanies the preaching of the Gospel when a sinner, dead in trespasses and sins, responds to the call to repent and believe the Gospel. Here is not simply a human reaction. Here is the divine miracle of the new birth in a person's soul. Christians, in the full sense of the word, are those who have experienced the regenerating power of God bringing them to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as the only Saviour for sinners and to trust in Him for their own salvation. Moreover, this is a work of God the Holy Spirit.
Our salvation is Trinitarian. As God the Father sent God the Son, so God the Holy Spirit brings into being that new life of walking with the Saviour and growing in likeness to Him. Where there is this life there will be faith, love and obedience.
All of us who are Christians know that there can be fluctuations in our growth. Sadly, there can be backslidings and we may become subject to doubts about the reality of our spiritual state. Yet where this work has taken place it can never be undone because it is a divine work. We shall be happiest as Christians when we are making our calling and election sure (2 Peter 1:10), yet even in our darker times the promise of the Lord remains. "My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: and I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand" (John 10:27,28). Even when in despair about himself, the Christian still looks to the One who loved him and gave Himself for him. A Christian is a person who trusts in Christ from the first to the last. |
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