True gospel - What is a Christian really?

The true Good News

What is a Christian really?

This is not the message I originally planned to share this week. However, I was confronted by a question earlier: Why do so many people accept God and then live anyway they want? Basically there are two answers to this:

1. They do not know the God with whom we have to do.
2. They were taught a false gospel.

In a following post (Hearing the voice of the Good Shepherd) I am going to talk about the first point. Here I just want to hook on to the previous post about church structures and revival. There are two main reasons given why so many young people leave the church:

1. They don’t get relevant answers to their questions and specifically the doubts with which their faith is assaulted from all sides.
2. They find church boring and irrelevant to real life. 
   I will venture that the true answer to both problems is not in changing our traditions and structures, but in introducing them to the living God. To have a living relationship with the living God isnever boring! It may be dangerous and costly, but it is not boring. Moreover, the person having a relationship and experience of the living God is never at a disadvantage against even the cleverest atheistic argument. The reality of God in our lives is the most important answer to any atheistic or other argument – it is the word of our testimony (Rev.12:11). Of course there is more – It helps to discover that there are good answers to most atheistic questions (e.g. Cold Case Christianity). But more important than any knowledge of (true) facts, is knowing God personally.

What does it mean to be a Christian? This question touches the root of the gospel. The one “definition” for Christian in the Bible, explaining where the term was first used, says that the disciples were first called “Christains” in Antioch (Acts 11:26). A disciple of Jesus is a follower, a student, an apprentice of the living Jesus who have risen from death, in a personal relationship; it is not only about trying to follow the example of Jesus when He was on earth. One “false gospel” which is sometimes taught and a reason for people living “anyway they want” after accepting Jesus… is that you can be a “Christian” and “saved”, but without being a disciple or follower of Jesus Christ or the need for anything more really, than a one-time “decision for Christ”. This is one side of the false gospel, which can be called the “gospel” of lawlessness (Frank Viola calls it the gospel of libertarianism) – mentioned in Matt.7:23, 23:28, 24:12, Rom.6:19, Tit.2:14, 1 Joh.3:4. Read the passages and you will get a pretty good idea what Jesus thinks of this!

This gospel of lawlessness, however, is often a reaction to another “false gospel”, the “gospel” of legalism. This is the gospel that says that now, after having repented and accepted Jesus Christ, you need to start living “like a Christian”. In the New Testament time, this was mostly by requiring new believers to keep all the Torah (Law) of Moses – they had to be circumcised (become Jews) and commanded to keep the whole law (after all, Jesus was a Jew and kept the whole Law, so as his followers, so should we). In modern-day Christianity our legalism is more hidden. We know that we do not have to keep the whole Law of Moses, but instead, we create our own list of (human-made?) laws. “Now that you are a Christian, you need to pray everyday, read your Bible, go to church and witness to the gospel.” You have to wear certain clothes or avoid certain places, etc… not only that, you need to live in the same way as Jesus did (read the “sermon on the mount” as a starting point). And here is the thing, if you devote yourself to Jesus and to loving like He did and living like He commands us to live… you will soon learn that the Christian life is simply impossible (“Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect” – Matt.5:48, 2 Cor.13:11). At this stage you will have a few options:

1. Give up on the Christian life. It is simply not possible for me, so I will not even try. And then I grab on to a false (partial) gospel of “grace” that says that it doesn’t matter how I live anymore… as long as I “believe” in Jesus (actually, according to James 2 this is not real faith). I fall back to the gospel of lawlessness. This is often the starting point and reason for those who teach a gospel of lawlessness. They found Rom.7 to be true in their lives… I cannot do what I know I should.
2. Become self-righteous. I change the requirements to something that I find easy to do. And then I can judge those others who sin in different ways to the way I sin (their sins are always worse than my own). I become a legalist, making a list of Christian things to do (including mostly those that I find easy and leaving out the more difficult parts). And then I compare myself to others and feel good about myself for not sinning like they do… “God I thank you that I am not like other people…” (Luk.18:11).
3. I keep on living under condemnation. I keep on trying in my own strength (and failing). A life of “walking and falling”, often more on the ground and going backward than actually going forward.
4. Discover who I am in Messiah and the power of his Holy Spirit. Moving from Rom.7 into the reality of Rom.8. Realise that I have been born again, that I am a new creation; that Jesus actually livesin me and lives his life through me; that just as I gave myself to Himwhen I first came to Him, I need to keep on living in dependence on Him, being led and empowered by his Spirit. Discover the true Good News of the Kingdom of God. Not only learning that I should follow Jesus Christ as his disciple, but learning how to follow Him, how to hear his voice, how to obey Him and be filled with his Holy Spirit.

What is the true Good News (gospel)? That God has done for us and will do in us what we could not do for ourselves. That it is primarily about his Kingdom and his plan in the world (and our part in it) and not simply about being saved from hell. The Lord is establishing his Kingdom on earth through us. We are no longer part of the kingdoms of this world, but become citizens of the Kingdom of God that was established by the Messiah King, Jesus (Yeshua) of Nazareth. It is through our unity with Him that we are free and saved from our sin (It is is very simple: “And this is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life..” 1 John 5:11-12). It is all about the King, the Messiah Jesus. It is this perspective the enables us to identify any false gospel (there are many): if it is not above all about Jesus Himself and our position in Him, it is false. If it is aboutourselves and our attempts (or lack of even trying), it is false. The true gospel of the Kingdom is all about the King. We do not need to know every false gospel and false teaching in order to identify what is false… we only need to know the true Good News (that God has finally established his coming Kingdom here on earth through Jesus, his Son) in order to see what is in contradiction to this gospel. He is the One who enables us to live according to his will, changing us into the image of his Son (Rom.8:29).