Yes I Am

In trying to think of ways to explain what it means to be a Christian, I never run out of ideas. I could probably blog from now 'til Jesus comes and never get through testifying about what it means to be a Christian. But I want to move on to other topics, as well. So let me sum up...

I am a Christian. I follow Christ. I am His disciple. I was made by Him to be like Him, and I want to become more and more like Him every day. I believe in Him, and I believe His Word. I am a student and a teacher, an imitator and an example. I belong to Him, and I want to be with Him.

I am forgiven. I am redeemed. I am born again. I am loved unconditionally, and I love in return. I am a new creation. Old things have passed away, all things have become new. I am committed. I am determined. I am resolved. I am persuaded. I am confident.

I have hope. I have life. I have a future. I have assurance. I have all that I will ever need in Him. I have a calling on my life to worship Him and to serve Him. I have a destiny. I have a purpose, and God has a plan for me.

Most of all, I am blessed in every possible way because I am His, and He is mine.

I Believe

Being a Christian, belonging to Christ, means that I believe and have placed my trust in something far greater than myself. I am a mere mortal living out my human existence in a frail, flawed, fallen state. I do not have the power, the knowledge, or the ability to do anything that even remotely comes close to saving myself in either a temporal or eternal sense. But the good news is I don't have to. God, through Jesus Christ, has done everything necessary for me to be redeemed, saved from sin, sickness, satan, self, and ultimately eternal separation from God. All that is required of me is that I believe.

I believe in God, the eternally existent I AM, who was before anything else was, who is all the time everything I need Him to be, and who will continue forever to be after everything else has reached its end. I believe in Him as the Almighty Creator, who brought all that is into existence through the power of His spoken Word and who sustains it all with the power of His will. He is the source of everything everywhere, and without Him there is nothing that can exist now, that has ever existed before, or that will ever exist after.

I believe that the Bible is the divinely inspired revelation of God to His creation, that those ancient texts provide my human understanding with all the information I need to know God and to live for Him. It is my all sufficient guide for faith and conduct, for belief and practice. When it speaks, I speak; when it is silent, I am silent. If it says it, I believe it, for it has the answer to every question and the solution to every problem. I believe that it is the written Word of God, and that every word within it is meaningful to my personal life. As I have often said, I believe it all from Table of Contents to Maps.

I believe that Jesus Christ is the only begotten Son of God, that he was God made flesh to dwell among men, to bear my sins in His sinless body to the cross on which He paid the ultimate sacrifice for my salvation. I believe that He has been given the Name above every name, and that it is the only Name by which we can be saved. I believe in Him as my Savior, my Healer, my Baptizer, any my soon-coming King of kings and Lord of lords. I believe that He died, that He was buried according to Scripture, and that He rose again on the third day, and that He appeared to many witnesses who gave testimony concerning the reality of His resurrection. And I believe that He is alive today, sitting in heaven at the right hand of the majestic throne of God in heaven.

I believe in a whole lot of other things, but mostly what I want to communicate is that I believe in God, I believe in His Son, and I believe in His Word, and those three have made me what I am, govern my life completely and make me become what God wants me to be. And I cannot pick and choose what to believe about God; I must put my faith totally and completely in what He has revealed of Himself to mankind through His Son and His Word. And in doing so, I know I can never go wrong.

I Belong to Him

Being a Christian is not about belonging to a church or a denomination or a religion. Being a Christian is about belonging to the God of all that is. In fact, belonging to Him is what makes me what I am. I am a Christian because I am His.

In a world that embraces independence and personal freedom, I am proud to say that I belong to God. I cannot live without Him, I cannot live outside of Him. I live because He says I live, and that life should be lived as He says it should. I am not my own. This body that holds my soul and my life will one day be exchanged for a new one incorruptible, but both this shell and the glory that awaits belong to God. In accepting God as my God and Jesus Christ as my Lord, in receiving the indwelling of the Holy Spirit as a seal of adoption, I have given up my freedom and my independence. Whatever freewill I had I have gladly surrendered to Him who is able to keep all which I have committed to Him.

And I am not my own because I have been bought with a price. I am saved by grace, the free gift of God, but just because it was given to me freely does not mean it was obtained without a cost. Jesus Christ paid the price for me with His own precious blood, with His very life and breath, purchasing through His sacrifice my very existence. I was a slave to sin and satan, bound for hell with no redeeming qualities in and of myself. He has redeemed me by grace, not because I deserved it but because He wanted to do it out of His own love for me. And because the price has been paid and I have been ransomed from a lifetime of sin and an eternity of separation from God, I live my life in the Son of God.

I have become the precious possession of God, His own special individual. I am indebted to Him forever for what He has done for me, and I know that I can never repay Him what I owe. But He has forgiven any debt I owe, erased the account that was against my name, and extended His love, His grace, His mercy to me freely, asking only that I give myself totally and completely to Him. Now I no longer have authority over my body or my ability to choose to what to do with it. To exercise my own authority is to reject His. To choose myself over Him is to reject the wonderful gift so liberally given to me. This body is His, a body prepared to do the will of God, a temple prepared as a dwelling place for the very holy presence of God, a living sacrifice offered as holy and acceptable to God. This is my reasonable service, for I am His servant and His Son.

I belong to Him.

I am a Christian

Titles are impossibly inept in defining and describing what is really meant by the statement, I am. To say that I am a Christian is more than just putting a definition on my current status or commitment. It is more than an explanation of the beliefs and convictions to which I subscribe. To say I am a Christian is, to me, a summation of my very existence. It is what God intended me to be from the beginning of creation, what He destined me to become at His appointed time, what He wills for me to be until the end of my life that I may inherit the eternal things beyond this earthly life and existence. To say I am a Christian should in and of itself explain me and everything there is to know about me. Before I am anything else, I am a Christian.

But what does that mean?

"They were first called Christians at Antioch," the Bible tells us. It was originally a term of derision, of bias and prejudice and hatred, an epithet uttered against those who were different. It was applied to those who followed the teachings and imitated the lifestyle of the one called Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God. And it was taken up proudly as a banner proclaiming to the world who they were and what they were about. These were the disciples of the Christ, the anointed one, the lamb of God who died and rose again to take away the sins of the world and save for all eternity those who believe in Him for salvation. Yes, I am a Christian.

I am a disciple of Him. I am a student of Him. I am a follower of Him. I read His word to know what He said and did, to learn what He expects of me, and what He has promised. I pray to Him and I a converse with Him, knowing that He hears me because His Word says that He does, but also knowing that He talks back because I have experienced it for myself. The Lord Jesus Christ still communes and communicates with those who are His. I try to live my life as He would have me live it, thought I will be the first to admit that I do not always measure up completely to the fullness of His stature and standard. There are times that I fall short of His glory, but when I do I know that I am falling on His grace.

Ultimately, as a Christian I want to be like Him, just like Him. I want to look like Him, and walk like Him. I want to talk like Him and touch people like He touched them. In His Word He promised His disciples that if they lived in Him and became like Him, they would do as He had done and greater things also. I strive to live in Him and to become like Him, so that I can do as He did.

My Manifesto

A number of years ago, I went through the personal exercise of developing a mission statement for my life. I identified my several roles in life and the ideals I valued most in helping me fulfill my responsibilities, and then I brought it all together in a manifesto that I have tried to revisit annually to keep me mindful of those truths I believe foundational to my life. Now I'd like to present that manifesto here and write about the values that shape me and my worldview.

I am a Christian.

I am a preacher.

I am a son.

I am a brother.

I am an uncle.

I am a friend.

I value

Faith

Family

Friendship

Fellowship

Freedom

Fitness

Forgiveness

Faithfulness

Fruitfulness

Future

I will love and I will serve.

I will honor God above all else.

I will honor those things I value most

in fulfilling the responsibilities of my relationships and roles.

I will honor Jesus Christ in all that I do,

continually growing to become more like Him.

This is my manifesto.

A Blessed Tent

The house of the wicked will be overthrown,

but the tent of the upright will flourish.

Proverbs 14:11

Who is more blessed? Is it the one who is settled in a house all his own, with all of his furnishings and possessions and treasures under a solid roof? Or is it the sojourner in the portable tent? We live in a church culture that continues to insist that wealth and worldly success are the marks of true righteousness, that obtaining power, possessions and popularity are signs of God's favor and blessing upon a life. And many times, our pursuit of God has more to do with what we can get out of the relationship rather than how we can grow.

Abraham was a man of God who dwelt in tents, with Isaac and Jacob his descendants. He was rich by this world's standards, but he had no house to call home. He was called to follow God wherever God led him, which meant his humble abode needed to be mobile out of necessity. In a moment's notice, it could be taken down, rolled up, and packed on a camel's back for a journey to God-knew-where. A house all his own might have kept him from being that obedient, that willing to break camp and move whenever God wanted him to. A house all his own might have offered so much comfort that the inconvenience of a transient lifestyle might have made him stay put.

Abraham never had a home on this terrestrial sphere, and he never owned a piece of ground except a burial plot. But the Bible said he understood he was just a pilgrim in this world of sin, someone who was passing through to a far better country. With eyes of faith he looked beyond what man could build to that city which has foundation, whose builder and maker was God. Having received the promise of an earthly inheritance, He kept his eyes on the skies, the true prize of the righteous...not a home built of wood and stone, but a mansion of glory in the presence of God.

And consider those who had houses while Abraham dwelt in tents. The five cities of the plain were consumed by God's fire for their sins, and Lot lost all he had in the conflagration. Two generations later, the city of Shechem was put to the sword and burned by Abraham's grandsons. Four generations after that, Joshua led the people of Israel in conquest, taking over those cities that had been built by the godless. Houses don't make you safe, and cities don't make you secure. It is rather the relationship with God that grants you safety and security.

I'd rather be blessed in this tent as a faithful man of God, than die in spiritual squalor in a house all my own.

Jesus Didn't Come Today

The Long Day ended at sundown, and Jesus didn't come.

Maybe you're not familiar with the Long Day, but it is a forty-eight hour period celebrated by the ancient Israelites to commemorate their new year--Rosh Hashanah. It is actually known by several names or alternate designations, but called primarily in the Bible the Feast of Trumpets. It was a High Holy Day, a special Sabbath, a memorial of blowing of trumpets, and a holy convocation, the first day of the seventh month on the religious calendar, but the first day of the first month on the civil calendar.

It is the only Jewish festival celebrated in connection with the New Moon, that first silver sliver of light that appears after the waning of the moon has ended. In ancient times, the appearance of the New Moon was unpredictable in terms of the exact day--it could occur on either of two days--and this gave rise to the saying, "No man knows the day or the hour." After a month long procession of trumpets, the shofars fell silent on the eve of the Long Day, and two witnesses stood together at the break of day watching for the rising of the moon. When they saw the light, a trumpet was sounded again, this time a long loud blast on the trumpet, the stuttering of the tongue against the roof of the trumpeter's mouth adding staccato notes between continuous long blasts until the trumpeter ran out of breath. It was called the great trumpet blast, and was also referred to as the Last Trump.

Jesus could come on any day, but there are many indications in Scripture that the Feast of Trumpets--the first of three fall feasts in Israel--is the next thing to be fulfilled on God's prophetic calendar. And Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:51 concerning the resurrection of the dead in Christ and the catching away of the living, "Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed--in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed." And so the day of the last trump is always marked on my calendar.

It is marked on my calendar, not because I think I can live like I want to 363 days of the year and then repent on Rosh Hashanah just in case, but because Rosh Hashanah serves as a reminder that Jesus Christ is coming back, with a trump and a shout, and I want to be ready whenever that day comes!