What is a Christian?

Once upon a time, there was a Christian youth ministry which organized a rally for high schoolers. They invited a popular Christian athlete, who happened to play for the local NFL team, to come and give his testimony. Over a thousand young people showed up.

The huge football player stepped up to the microphone. He was a hero in the eyes of most of the kids. He talked to them about life on the playing field and in the locker room. He told them funny stories that made them laugh.

Then he spoke simply but eloquently of his faith in Jesus Christ. He described how Christ had given him the strength to live and to overcome his problems. At the end of his talk, he asked his audience if they would like to commit their lives to Jesus Christ, too.

At the beginning of the rally, the organizers had given a 3x5 card to every young person. On the card was a place for their name, address, and telephone number. There was also a little square box in one corner of the card. The football player asked the kids to bow their heads. He encouraged them to make their own private decision about Jesus Christ, and if they wanted to commit their lives to him, to put an “X” in the box.

The auditorium was quiet as the young people filled in their cards. Then they folded them and placed them in baskets that were passed around. After the meeting , when the cards were tallied, the organizers found to their excitement that an overwhelming majority of the young people present had indicated that they wanted to commit their lives to Christ. The leaders were ecstatic! They praised God for this wonderful harvest of souls.

But then, over the next few days, as they sought to follow up all these contacts, the youth ministry people began to see things in a different light. They began to find that, of the hundreds of young people who had indicated on the card a commitment to follow Christ, only a few were even willing to talk on the phone to someone about their decision.

Fewer still were open to the possibility of actually getting together with the youth leaders to discuss their new faith in Christ. To make a long story short, out of the hundreds of kids at the rally who responded to the invitation, only a handful actually ended up becoming involved in a Bible study for new believers.

What happened to all the rest? When they responded to the invitation to commit their life to Christ, what were they really doing? Were they responding to Jesus, or were they responding to the football player? Was their decision a spiritual decision, or did it have more to do with group psychology or hero-worship?

For that matter, what does it mean for a person to respond to Jesus Christ? What takes place in that moment of decision? What happens that causes a person to go from being an uncommitted spiritual bystander to a committed follower of Jesus Christ?

We need to wrestle with those questions, because the word “Christian” has come to mean almost anything in our society. A recent survey indicates that 8 out of 10 Americans agree with the statement “Jesus Christ is the Son of God.” But have 8 out of 10 Americans actually committed their lives to him? Are all of those people Christians?

It has become popular, and in some circles, almost “politically correct” to claim the label Christian. But what does it mean?

A Hollywood actress may speak enthusiastically of having had a “born-again” religious experience. She wears a cross around her neck. Yet her next movie features liberal doses of sex and violence. Her second marriage is in the process of breaking up. Is she a Christian?

Take Sinead O’Connor for example. O’Connor is a young Irish singer who seems to go out of her way to court controversy. Her trademark is her shaved head. Last year, she refused to allow the National Anthem to be played at one of her concerts. Then, she was given a Grammy Award, but she refused to accept it. Recently, on Saturday Night Live, she tore up a picture of the Pope. When she appeared at Madison Square Garden in a Bob Dylan tribute, she was booed off the stage. Following the concert, she blasted Dylan for going onstage himself after that had happened to a fellow artist.

Yet in a recent interview, Sinead O’Connor declared “I consider myself to be a Christian. I believe in God, and in what I’m trying to do.” Is Sinead O’Connor a Christian because she considers herself to be one?

In the recent presidential election, the candidates for each party differed widely on many important issues of morality and ethics. Yet each one claimed to be a Christian and to belong to a Christian church. Which ones really are Christians? Are they all Christians? What is a Christian?

That is the question I would like to explore with you today, and in the coming few weeks. What is it that makes a person a Christian. There is a lot of confusion about this issue, not only in the world at large, but in the church.

It’s important that we know what it is that makes a person a Christian, not so that we can go around making judgments about other people, but so that we can examine our own lives. Paul says “Examine yourselves, to see if you are in the faith.” So that’s what we want to do over the next few weeks.

Charles Colson, in his book Born Again, tells how he became a Christian. Because he was a well-known political figure in Washington during the Watergate years, Colson’s conversion was newsworthy. One editorial cartoonist drew a hilarious cartoon of Colson after his conversion. He had him dressed in flowing robes, marching outside the White House. He was carrying a Bible and a sign that said “Repent, for lo I am about to lay it on the House Judiciary Committee!” President Nixon and his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, were looking on with bemused expressions on their faces. Ziegler says to the President “You’d better call the Reverend Billy - Colson’s got religion.”

That’s the way many people think of Christian conversion: when you become a Christian, you’ve “got religion”. Earlier in the service, we read the story of another government official who became a Christian. He wasn’t from Washington DC; he was from the capital of ancient Ethiopia. His life was changed. But that change was not a religious change. That man did not go from being irreligious to being religious.

The Bible tells us that he was already a very religious man. That’s why he had gone up to Jerusalem. He had gone there to worship. And when he was returning home, he was reading the book of Isaiah as he sat in his chariot. He was a very religious man. But something was missing. He needed to become a Christian.

There are other examples of that kind of conversion in the Bible - Nicodemus, Saul of Tarsus, Lydia - religious people who came to realize that their religion wasn’t really capable of changing their life. Becoming a Christian is not a matter of becoming more religious. It’s much deeper than that.

Boil Christianity down to its barest essentials and you find that conversion involves two things - repentance and faith. A person who is a Christian is a person who has turned. He has turned away from sin. That’s repentance. And he has turned to the person of Jesus Christ. That’s faith. Let’s look at these two concepts.

It may surprise you to know this, but the very first word of the very first sermon that Jesus preached when he began his public ministry was the word “Repent.”

Matthew 4:17 From that time on Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”

The idea of repentance is a major element in Jesus’ ministry. In Mark 1 we hear Jesus saying “The time has come. The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!” In Luke 5:32, Jesus said “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

At the end of his ministry, when he was commissioning his disciples, he said “The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.”

But what does repentance mean? There are a lot of misconceptions about it. The word “repent” conjures up images of wild-eyed street preachers wearing sandwich boards declaring that the end of the world is at hand. People snicker when they hear the word “repent”.

But repentance is a simple concept. It simply means to turn away from sin. The word for repent in Greek is metanoia. It comes from two words: meta, which means after; and noeo, which means to think, or to understand. So, literally, metanoia means to think after, or to think again; in other words, to change your mind.

Repentance is not merely feeling ashamed or sorry about your sin. It goes much deeper than simply feeling bad about what you’ve done. True repentance involves your mind, your will, and your emotions.

True repentance begins with your mind, your intellect, when you finally understand that you are a sinner, and that your sin is an affront to holy God, and that you are personally responsible for the choices that have made you that way.

Repentance includes your emotions. When you realize the awful implications of sin, you are overcome with a profound sense of sorrow and anguish at having sinned against God. Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount “Blessed are those who mourn.” This is what he was talking about - the godly sorrow brought about by repentance.

And, most importantly, true repentance involves your will. True repentance causes you to purposefully decide to forsake the way of unrighteousness and to pursue righteousness instead. You have changed your mind about sin, you’ve changed the way you feel about a life of sin, and you’re ready to do something about it. That’s what true repentance is.

Now the amazing thing about repentance is that it is something that only God can give us. We are such creatures of sin, that we are incapable on our own of changing our minds about it, of seeing it in a different light, of seeing our sin the way that God sees it. We’re like those odd little fish who swim in the underground rivers of Kentucky. They have swum around in the dark for so long that they have lost their eyes. The darkness has blinded them to the light.

God grants us a spirit of repentance so that we may repent. And repentance is one of the two basic components of becoming a Christian.

It’s important to know that, because there are many people who would like to become Christians without repentance. It’s true today, and it was true in Jesus’ day. There were great crowds who followed Jesus. They loved to see him do miracles, and heal the sick. They especially loved it when he fed them. They were, in that sense, attracted to Jesus, but they never came to grips with their own sin and their need to repent of it. They were fans of Jesus, not followers. They wanted what Jesus could give them, without really dealing with their spiritual condition.

That’s the way a lot of people are today. They want to be known as followers of Jesus. There are certain aspects of Christianity that they find appealing. They want to be known as Christians. They like to wear that label. But they never come to grips with their own sinfulness and spiritual lostness. They never truly mourn over their sin and determine to turn away from it. They never truly repent.

Repentance is one of the two basic things you have to do to become a Christian. The other one is faith. Repentance is when you turn away from your sin; faith is when you turn toward Jesus Christ. You cannot have one without the other.

If you have repentance without faith in Jesus Christ, you are no better off than a Hindu holy man who spends his life trying to overcome his own sin. But if you have faith in Christ without repentance, you are like the hypocrites who call themselves Christians while they live like the devil.

Faith, like repentance, is a concept that is fuzzy for most people. But it is a very simple concept. The word “faith” in the Bible can mean basically two things:

First, it means to believe that something is true. For example, if I were to tell you that our new hymnals were published by Word Music, and you believed me, that would be an example of faith. You would be having faith in the validity of my statement. But you could always pick up a hymnal and check it out for yourself. There would still be that objective evidence for your faith. Faith, in that sense, is simply intellectual agreement.

But there’s another dimension of faith that comes closer to the kind of faith necessary for conversion. It is personal trust. Let’s take that example of the hymnal again. Suppose that I told you that, in looking for a new hymnal, our music committee researched all the available options and looked at all the current hymnals on the market, and we decided that the hymnal published by Word Music is the best evangelical hymnal available today.

Now that’s a statement that is a little harder to verify, isn’t it! In fact, it isn’t even a statement of objective fact; it’s more like a value judgment. And whether or not you choose to believe it has more to do with how you feel about me than anything else. You sit there and say to yourself “Has the Pastor ever lied to me? Do I trust his judgment? Has he shown any evidence that he knows what he is talking about when it comes to music?”

The issue is personal trust. Believing what I say is based on whether or not you believe in me.

The Bible says that if you want to become a Christian, that is the kind of faith you have to have in Jesus Christ. It’s faith in Him, not just faith in facts you know about Him. It’s not just intellectual agreement; it’s personal trust.

That personal trust affects your whole being - mind, will, and emotions. Let me give you an example. Back in September, thanks to the kindness of the folks at North American Airlines, I had the opportunity to sit on the flight deck of a Boeing 757 as it taxied out to the end of the runway and took off into a beautiful moonlit sky. For the pilots flying the airplane, it was just another day at the office. For me, it was a thrilling experience.

I am an aviation buff and have read lots of books about airplanes. I have even read the history of the Boeing Aircraft Company of Seattle, Washington. I know that they have built more airliners than anyone else in the world. I have read about the Boeing 757 specifically. I know how fast, how far, and how high it can fly, and how many people it can carry. I certainly don’t know everything about the 757, but I know enough to know that it is one of the best airliners in the sky today.

But suppose I know all that information in my head, and when the crew invites me to board the aircraft and fly with them, I say “No way! You’re not getting me up in that thing!” I would have intellectual assent, but I would be lacking personal trust. I might believe a lot of facts about an airplane, but until I strap myself in and fly in it, until I stake my life on it, I don’t really believe in the airplane.

That’s the kind of faith it takes for a person to become a Christian. It’s the kind of faith that says “Look, I don’t know everything there is to know about Jesus Christ, but I trust what I do know. He is trustworthy. And I want to entrust myself completely to Him. No holding back, no reservations. From here on in, I belong to Him.” That kind of faith is the handle by which we lay hold of the grace of God and the gift of salvation.

John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Acts 10:43 All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.

Repentance is turning away from sin. Saving faith is turning to Jesus Christ. Unless you can say that both are true of you, you cannot claim to be a Christian.

Over the next four weeks, we are going to look at some of the changes that take place in your life when you become a Christian. We’re going to look at how we have peace with God through Jesus Christ. We’re going to look at the whole subject of what it means to be born again. We’re going to examine the beautiful way that a Christian is adopted into God’s family. Finally, we’re going to look at how the Holy Spirit comes to live in our lives. These are marvellous truths.

But they all begin with conversion; that vital moment of decision where you repent and put your faith in Jesus Christ.

Perhaps you’ve been sitting here taking spiritual inventory this morning. Maybe as I have spoken of what it means to be a Christian, you’ve sensed some doubts in your own mind as to whether or not you really are one.

Maybe your commitment to Christ has been cultural. You come to church because your parents did. You think of yourself as a Christian because it runs in your family.

Or perhaps, as I talked about repentance, you’ve realized that that is something you’ve never really come to grips with. Maybe you’ve never thought of yourself as a lost sinner. Maybe you’ve thought that you’re doing the best you can, and you hope that God will accept you on that basis.

You can lay hold of the grace of God right now. God wants to give you that spirit of repentance and that gift of faith that are essential if you are to become a Christian. Ask Him to help you see yourself as you really are - a sinner who is lost and separated from Him. And ask Him to help you get to know Jesus Christ well enough to want to trust him.