If someone were to ask you if you were a Christian. How would you answer?
If you answer in the affirmative then this now calls for clarity. What do you mean when you say you’re a Christian? If you’re like many people in the world today you may simply mean that you believe in God and you try to live a life adhering to Christian principles:
- You don’t steal (unless you really need to)
- You don’t cuss (on Sundays)
- You only drink for “medicinal purpose”
Of course I’m being cheeky here but this is a concept a lot of well-meaning people misunderstand and the scary thing is that they’re essentially gambling with their eternity. Here’s the thing “belief” is not enough.
“You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.”
James 2:19 NIV
The takeaway of course is that demons will still be condemned to an eternity of unimaginable suffering.
In a recent article on the Christianity Today website the author addressed the over-inflated claim that Christianity is losing ground by simply framing the issue in terms of what really is happening. Instead of a bunch of church attendees claiming to be Christians, the lines are actually being drawn in the sand. Folks are leaving the church because they realise that since they don’t subscribe to the teachings of the Bible in their entirety, this means they are in fact NOT Christians.
As a quote I once heard put it “Sitting in a church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than sitting in a garage makes you a car”.
As I read through some of the comments below the above mentioned article it was encouraging to see Christian commenters who had a clear understanding of the root of this shift.
One quoted a verse that sums it up nicely:
“3 For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. 4 They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.”
2 Timothy 4:3-4
You see a true Christian will believe that:
- The Bible is the divinely inspired word of the one true living God
- Jesus Christ was and is fully God and fully man
- His death and subsequent resurrection paid the price of sin for all who believe in Him
- Living a “good” life doesn’t get you into Heaven. Faith in Christ is THE only way.
So now we come back to the original question – are you a Christian?