What It Means To Be A Christian

I want to take a few moments to explain what I mean by "Christian."

The term Christian means, "Christ one," as in, a follower of Jesus Christ. 

This is more than a general belief in the Christian God.  I grew up going to church, hearing about God and that Jesus died for our sins, but I didn't get it.  I didn't see what it meant.  Somewhere along the line I had even come to think God was just for little kids.  How I came to believe this I'll never know, especially when every Sunday I went to a church filled with adults, some of them teaching me in Sunday School. 

It was when I was in seventh grade that a conversation with a friend led to her asking me, "Don't you know you have to ask Jesus into your heart?" No, I didn't know that.  I remember feeling guilty and somehow "caught" because I had left God behind in my younger years believing Him to be irrelevant for me. Then when I was 14 I heard about God in a different way.  I went to a Bible Study conducted by a Christian ministry called Young Life.  I was in a room with girls my own age and I noticed something very different about them.  One evening, we were asked to break up into groups of two.  I confessed to my partner that I felt very different from the rest, that they all talked about God as if they knew Him personally, and I didn't get it.  That night, I saw God is real and that He wanted to have personal relationships with people. Drawing on my seventh grade experience, I went home and asked Jesus into my heart.

I became a Christian that night.  My understanding of what that meant grew as I continued going to Bible studies and grew in my faith. 

Being a Christian means you have placed your trust in Jesus for your getting to heaven.  Until we trust Jesus as the means to heaven, we are trusting something else.  Usually we're trusting that we're a good enough person, and only the super bad people go to hell.  If we have a moral compass and are a decent person, we trust God will accept us based on that. 

That's not the way it works, though. 

We can't be good enough. 

God's holiness demands a standard of perfection. 

If I hadn't blown it long before, I'm positive I blew it when I stole my best friend's pencil in second grade. (Sorry, Pam. Thanks for forgiving me and laughing with me over this about 30 years later!)  We cannot be perfect so we are not fit for heaven.  God is a God of love, yes, but He is also a holy, pure, and righteous God.  His purity cannot abide the dirtiness of sin.  In fact, the Bible says that our righteousness (the best we can come up with on our own)  is like filthy rags to Him; His purity is that far above us.

Yet, He loves us.  He wants a relationship with us.  Think about that for a second; it's quite amazing.  He WANTS a relationship with you.  He doesn't want any of us to be separated from Him, either on earth or in hell.  He wants us with Him because He loves us.

So, there's a dilemma:  He wants relationship with us; He loves us; He wants us to be with Him now and in heaven, BUT, we have sin, we are unclean and cannot share His presence, and are therefore destined to be separated from Him not only on this earth but also in eternity after we die.

Enter, the solution.  God came up with the solution Himself.  He, being Three in One in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, chose to come to earth Himself in the form of Jesus the Son and take the penalty of our sin upon Himself. 

"The wages of sin is death." it says in Romans 6:23.  We sinned.  He never sinned.  He lived a perfectly sinless life here on earth and He came for the expressed purpose of dying in each of our places. 

That's the part I never got.  All my growing up years I'd heard "Jesus died for us" and "Jesus died for our sins", but I never got it.  I never caught on that:

1.) He died for me, not just the collective "us," and

2.) He died in my place.  "For us" means "in our place" as well as "for our benefit".  He made the sacrifice of Himself so that our sin was posted to His account and His sinless righteousness can be posted to our account.  All that is required of us is to believe this.  His death has made forgiveness available to us.  Our belief in His solution makes it effective for us.

When we stop trusting ourselves to be acceptable to God and begin to trust in Jesus' death as the means to make us acceptable to God, we've become Christians.  God sees us through Christ's sacrifice and considers us clean.  That's what is meant by the expressions which talk about "Jesus' blood washing us clean", or Christians being "covered by His blood". 
 
You don't have to have a stand-out experience like I did to become a Christian.  Some people's story of coming to belief is gradual and they cannot pin-point a specific time when they came to belief.  Others can identify the date and time.  The term "asking Jesus into your heart" has become a common means of declaring this belief.  Another means of declaring your faith in His death for you is by praying a prayer like this one:

God, I know I am a sinner. My sin separates me from You.  I cannot meet your standard on my own.  I cannot be good enough for heaven, I cannot earn my way there.  I believe what Jesus did on the cross for me.  I place my trust in His death for me - in my place - as the means by which I am forgiven and can now enter into a right relationship with You.  Thank You, Jesus, for dying for me.

The word "gospel" means "good news." The solution has been given and it doesn't depend on our hopeless attempts at being good enough! That is good news, indeed.

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Here is the Good News laid out in 12 scriptures:


"All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God."  ~ Romans 3:23


"But we are all like an unclean thing and all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags; We all fade as a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away."  ~ Isaiah 64:6 (NKJV)


"There is none righteous, not even one."  ~Romans 3:10

"For the wages of sin is death but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."  ~ Romans 6:23

"...by the works of the law no flesh will be justified in His sight; for through the law comes the knowledge of sin."  ~ Romans 3:20

"For if a law had been given which was able to impart life, then righteousness would indeed have been based on law."  ~ Galatians 3:21

"But God demonstrates his own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."  ~ Romans 5:8

"For God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life."  ~ John 3:16

"I came that they might have life, and have it abundantly."   ~ John 10:10

"For by grace you are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, that no one should boast."  ~Ephesians 2:8-9

"...if righteousness comes through the Law, then Christ died needlessly"  ~ Galatians 2:21

"I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me."  ~ John 14:6