“Are You A Christian?”

Today we are seeking the answer to a very simple question.  Are you a Christian?  I hope to think about it in a light differently than you might think.  Some of you have been in the church a long time; most, if not all, of your life.  Many of you have been Christians for a long time, some for just a short time, and some of you aren’t sure if you are and some know that you’re not.  So, I would like to just give an explanation of what it means to be a Christian with just a little bit of a different way than maybe you have heard it before.  We’ll get to Romans 3 in just a moment.

Did you know that our earth, this planet that we are on presently, is one of the smallest planets in our solar system? It is about between 7500 and 8000 miles thick; that’s its diameter. If I could stick a pole right through the earth, I would need one about 7,500 miles long.  If you were to go around the earth it would take you about 25,000 miles to do that.  However, we are in a very small solar system on a very small planet, and I am one person on this planet, and you are one person on this planet.  When I think about things like that I feel small.  When we were in Utah a week ago skiing and I’d see the mountains I would feel small, and that is not a bad sense, and nobody ever yawned the first time they saw the Grand Canyon, I don’t think.  You were overwhelmed and you were in awe, you didn’t have words to express what you saw. 

If you were to go out at night tonight, and if the sky were clear, and there were no electronic artificial lights around you and you looked to the sky with 20/20 vision, you could see about 3,000 stars in the northern hemisphere and the same would be true in the southern hemisphere at night.  However, in the 1500s on into the 1600s when Galileo invented his homemade telescope, he found that through his telescope in his hemisphere you could see 30,000 stars.  Well, we’ve got telescopes a little bit better than Galileo’s now, and scientists,…as a matter  of fact, I was just looking at some things… and some astronomers in Australia a few years ago estimated the number of stars.  Now I can’t understand exactly how you go about estimating the number of stars the way someone with their skill can, but the starts they estimated in the sky that can be found through all of our means now are 70 thousand million, million, million stars.  That would be a 7 followed by 22 zeros:  70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.  The proper number is 70 sextillion; I can’t count that far.

Do you know that in our galaxy, the Milky Way, there are about 200,000,000 stars they estimate, but now they are saying it may be upwards to 400,000,000 but if there were 200,000,000 stars just in our galaxy alone, and the estimate of the numbers of galaxies is just astounding, if you could count 3 stars per second and you were trying to count the stars in the Milky Way, if you counted 3 stars per seconds, after 100 years you would have counted less than 5% of the stars  in the Milky Way!

Do you know what the Bible says about God creating the stars?  In Genesis Chapter 1 on the fourth day, he describes God making the greater light, the sun, and the lesser light, the moon---and the stars.  That’s the phrase used to describe God making 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.  Feel small? But can you imagine that God has said from before the foundation of the world, he has predestined that we should be holy and blameless in his Son.  That your name is written in The Lamb’s Book of Life.  That He knows the number of the hairs on your head.  That there is not a sparrow that falls to the ground that God doesn’t know about that.

What is a Christian?  The first mark of a Christian is someone who has a clear recognition, a clear recognition of who God is and of who they are, or who you are.  Do you know who God is and who you are?  This is absolutely essential to being a Christian.  Now, let me lay a little bit of groundwork, especially for those of use who have grown up in church through the 50s, 60s and 70s.  The evangelical church in the United States of America and characteristically so, the Southern Baptists have led the way in decisionalistic salvation to where you present the gospel, Point 1, 2, 3 and 4:  You’re a sinner, God loves you, ask Jesus into your heart, and you get to go to heaven.  And, by doing that we have coaxed hundreds of thousands of people down an aisle to pray a prayer, called the Sinner’s Prayer, and said “You are now going to heaven.”  And of the 40,000 or so Southern Baptist Churches across our nation, most of us have at least double the number of members as we do attenders; people whom we have talked into praying a sinner’s prayer and then telling them they are going to heaven when they die.  And that scares me to death!  Because I think we’re giving false hope.  And now in our day and time, when we have people who think, and we are post Christian and beyond where people know about the Bible and know who Jesus is, and you throw out some kind of childish, juvenile thought like that, they are going to look at you and say, “What are you talking about?”

What I’m talking about this morning is a God who really saves real people and I want to show you how He did it.  The first thing we have to start with is understanding and knowing who God is.  The Bible opens with the words….”In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”  My point is simply this: If God, by the word of his mouth, can make this globe and all of the perfection of the state of things so life could exist, could make our solar system, could make the universe; He is a God to be worshipped.  “The heavens declare the glory of God, the firmament shows his handiwork.”  The very conscience of mankind has in it this essence of God’s almighty power of His divine nature.  We know God is a great God, but sometimes we push that away. 

Look at Romans Chapter 3, please: Verse 21:

We are in the middle of an argument.  Paul is telling the Romans what a Christian is and he is telling them that mankind has fallen, that they have sinned and they are separated from God and no matter how had they work, there is no way they could work their way back to God and then he begins to tell the gospel, how this lost person, this sinful person, this broken person becomes a Christian.

Verse 21:

“But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—“

I want to walk us through it because this is a very dense passage and it may be a bit difficult to understand.  It is dense and that’s the only reason it is hard to understand.  The concepts to grasp are clear, but the density of this… it makes it hard to just look at it and say “Oh, I understand that.”   What he’s saying is that the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law.  The Law is in one sense the whole of the Old Testament; in another sense it is The Ten Commandments.  It is the Law of Moses, or then also the first five books of the Old Testament.  He says, “It isn’t through the law that the righteousness of God has been made known to man, how man can become righteous and be like God and be with Him.  However, he says, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it, in the Law, in the Prophets, that is in the Old Testament, it is a showing forth that there is something coming to show man how to get right with God.  It’s not in the Old Testament fully; it’s going to be revealed in the New.

Verse 22:

“The righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.”  That’s it!  This is what Paul is telling them about.  The way you can get right with God, the righteousness of God through faith, not works, through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.  All who believe!  And then he cuts humanity down to size and says, for there is no distinction between Jew and Gentile, male and female, rich and poor….there is no distinction for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.  He is just simply being honest about humanity and that is part of the clear recognition of who we are.  We are a creation of God, of this magnificent massive, but intimately interested God, and we have done wrong.

At Joie’s aunt’s funeral this week, I had the privilege to do that funeral service, and sometimes words just come into your mouth, and I simply said, “It doesn’t take…[she was a Godly woman and gave me the privilege of presenting the gospel to a lot of family and a lot of community members] and I simply said, “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that you are a sinner.”  We need to get over the use of that word and let it say what it says.  And then you need to let Jesus do what he came to do, and deal with sin.  That’s what he came to deal with.  So, a Christian is one who has a clear recognition of this massive, omnipotent, this Almighty, all-knowing, everywhere present God, who created things, and then they look at themselves and they asked, “Have I put God first in my life?  Am I always doing righteous things? Do I do what’s right? Do I treat others the way I want to be treated? Do I love God above all things? Do I love my neighbor as myself?  Do I ever have wrong thoughts?  Do I ever have wrong motives?  Do I ever sneak and do something that I hope nobody sees? 

And then we begin to set ourselves down beside God and beside His Son,  the Lord Jesus Christ, and we see ‘for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.’ [I am so glad the Bible does not stop there.]  There is no distinction between you, me, or anybody else.  We’ve all sinned, we all fall short of the glory of God.  And then… it says, “And are…those who believe are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by His blood to be received by faith.” 

Now that is thick, but it is not too big for us to set our faith on and to get a grasp of.  The reason it is thick is that is the Bible compressed into about 4 verses.  That is the whole of the message of God.  Let’s just see quickly what it says to help us get a recognition of who we are and who God is.  He’s already said and we learned we are His creation, we learned that we have sinned, we fall short of giving God the glory due his name, of paying the attention to God that God should get, of putting God in our lives in His proper place.

But then He tells us about ourselves.  He tells us that through Jesus, through faith in Him we are justified.  That would tell me the reverse about me, before I believe in Jesus that I am not right with God; I am unjustified before Him.  God is just, I am unjust.  The other word for that is God is righteous, I am unrighteous. And since unrighteousness can never inherit the Kingdom of God, then I’m separated from Him.  My condition without Christ is I’m unjustified.  But he says, ‘through Christ you can be justified.’  We’ll come back and talk about what that means.  And then he says, ‘By his grace as a gift.’  It’s the work of God, his grace that’s free and he gives this justification as a gift.  I don’t get to work for it.  How does he give it?  Through the redemption.  Now that word tells me….justification tells me that I’m unrighteous; the word, redemption, tells me that I’m in bondage.  I’m a slave.  That’s a slave market term to where you went to redeem the slave with money.  And the gift of our salvation was purchased on the slave block of the cross, and Jesus, Himself, paid that price with his blood.

Now when He did that, he purchased my redemption for me that I am to receive through this justification as a gift in Christ Jesus and I receive that by faith, so the word, redemption, tells me that I am in bondage to sin, not only does it have a hold of me, I can’t get out of its grip.  I can’t stop doing what I am doing.  He didn’t just come to forgive me of committing sins, he came to forgive me and to keep me from being a sinner by nature and He’ll change that in the end.

And there’s a third word that we hardly use anymore, verse 25:

“Whom God, [that is Jesus]…God put Jesus forward as propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.”  That’s a big word; it’s a word of worship and what it simply means is this: When someone does something to you and you are all the way in the right, you are completely right, and they sin against you, they do something wrong at you, you get angry at them.  If someone, they stole your money, they broke into your house, they stole your car, they just walked up to you and punched you in the teeth, are you going to say ‘Thank you?’ You’re going to get ticked.  You are going to be angry and rightly so.  There is an anger that is right.  God says, “Be angry and do not sin.”  All people have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.  He made us; he gave us life.  He made us this earth to live on.  He gave us the keys to this earth and said, ‘exercise dominion over the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and the fowl of the air’ and we’ve blown it.  We looked at God and said I’m going to steal your dominion and I’m going to have it for myself; thank you for wanting to be God, but no thanks!

God’s mad.  If you have a God that cannot get mad, you don’t have the real God.  Whoever said God can’t get mad.  Everything God does is perfect so that means His anger is perfect and God is angry, not just at sin, he is angry at sinners.  Sometimes when we say, “God hates the sin, but loves the sinner,” we are softening the gospel.  God does not send sin to Hell.  He sends sinners to Hell.

You say, “Tony, you better back off, now.  This is a little too un-positive for this age.”  I don’t think so.  Let me explain why.  If God has told the truth, and He has, if God is righteous, and He is, if God is able to save through Jesus, and He is and He does, then if we don’t tell the truth we are sending people to Hell ourselves.  God has put his cross on this earth and hung His Son on it, so that you would not have to go to Hell.  But, unless you see the need for His Son you will die without Christ, helpless and hopeless in this world without God, but there is a gospel we are to tell, and I’m telling you this morning how you can become a Christian, and it is no joke, and it starts with a clear recognition of who you are and who God is, and because Jesus came, you can be justified.  That simply means that when you place your faith in Jesus Christ, God pronounces that you now are His child and you are justified.  There is no sin on you between you and God.  Now, that doesn’t mean you are made perfect; that happens later.  You move into this process the Bible calls sanctification, and when we die and we are in heaven, then we are glorified; then we are no longer sinners.  You are a sinner saved by grace if you are a Christian.  You are simultaneously a sinner and a Christian at the same time.  That’s why the flesh sets its desire against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh so that you cannot do the things that you would.  If you think you are going to be perfect this side of heaven, you don’t understand who you are.  You are going to struggle with sin until Jesus comes back, but the closer you get to him, the more accurately you see your sin, the more you understand what genuine Biblical repentance is and that repentance brings refreshing, you love your Savior more, you sin less and less, you become more like Him as you anticipate your heavenly home.  That’s what justification means.  Before God, right now, you are completely saved.  There is nothing more to be added so you can get better. 

So, you need to just thank God every day; that You did all the work, that You came after me, and that Your Son died in my place and there’s nothing I can add to it.  I’m yours, Lord, so thank you.  And then you need to thank Him for the price He paid, Jesus Christ, His death on the cross.  Oh yeah…that word, propitiation.  God’s mad.  What do you do with all that anger and wrath of God?  He put forth Jesus as a propitiation.  It was on the cross that God expended, totally spent all of his wrath.  That’s why the crucifixion was so unimaginably brutal on the Son of God, who bore the sins of the world on his shoulders.  So, God’s anger is not just calmed, it is satisfied.  And if you put your faith in Christ, my friend, He’s not angry with you, He has set His love on you from the foundation of the world.  God is not unjustly angry with anybody.  His anger is not like ours.  He doesn’t fly off the handle.  Everything about God is perfect. 

So, if you are a Christian, or want to become one, it begins with a clear recognition of who God is and who you are.  Obviously, there is a decision to be made.  I am not trying to counteract getting people to make a decision.  Anybody that is ever going to heaven has always repented of their sins by their own choice, their willful choice, but it’s always after God has come to them.  Jesus said, “No man can come to me except the Father who sent me draw him.”  That’s why it’s called salvation.  God always takes the first step to us.  But you have to decide, are you going to be a Christian or not?  You can’t just sit there and say, “Oh, God will get me one day or the other.”  You’ve got to step up and you’ve got to choose.  You’ve got to recognize who you are and say, “Yes, I am a sinner and I need to repent of my sins.” Not before this church, not before Tony, not because Tony said it, but because God said it and did it on the cross I can be saved, so, God I repent and I ask your Son, who is the only one who can, to save me.  You must do that if you are going to be born again, become a Christian.  But it follows from that, that a real Christian is one who is engaged in life.  In other words, and simply so, what you say you believe is seen in how you live.  Jesus said, “He who perseveres to the end will be saved.”  The fruit of the Holy Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, self-control; against such there is no law.  [And I think I got them all, I might have left one out; did you count?  There are 9 of them.  Just making sure you are listening.  Which one did I leave out?  You weren’t listening…. You get an “F.”]

What you say you believe is seen in how you live.  One of the problems with decisionalistic salvation is you get somebody down the aisle, they pray a prayer, they get baptized, they’re done.  Oh, my friend, if it were a true conversion that’s just the beginning.  You’ve got a lifetime ahead of you of knowing Christ, and the way you know you know Him is not by going back to the day you asked Him into your heart, but by inspecting the fruit in your garden of life.  So, let’s do a little inspection.  What you say you believe, is it seen in how you live at home?  That’s a good way to look around.  When you speak to your spouse or children in private, when they see you, do they catch you reading God’s Word? Do they catch you praying?  Do they ever hear you share your faith with someone?  At work or at school? 

Now, we like to divide adults and teenagers or students, in church work, and some division is appropriate, but we divide them way too far.  The big thing is adults are just more sophisticated hypocrites than the teenagers are.  But, you guys who are in school need to learn that you are hypocrites too, when you say one thing and live another way at school.  You see, your faith is fake if it doesn’t bear fruit.  I do not mean you’re thumping a Bible in front of people.  I mean you do what’s right!  You are a person of integrity.  You do share your faith when it’s appropriate.  What about at church?  What about at play?  You want to find out what somebody’s really like, see what they are like when they fall down a ski slope for 150 yards, which is what I did.  WHOA!  I found out what Justin Henderson was made of… he laughed at me the whole way! [Laughter]

No, you are engaged in life based on your clear recognition of who God is and who you are. You live with a secure humility that ‘if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”  We live life, engaged in life, with a sincere and secure humility that says we understand what John wrote to us when he said, “My little children, I write these things to you that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, who is the propitiation for our sins and not for ours only, but for those of the whole world. 

“God, I’ve sinned, I’m sorry, I am nothing but what you have made me.”  But not only do you have secure humility, you have confident hope.  “I am confident of this very thing, Paul said, ‘that He who began a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.”  You have a confident hope, and you are always growing in holiness because Romans 8:29 says that ‘God has predestined us to be conformed to the image of his son.’  And if I’m to be like Jesus, I know I’ve still got plenty of changing to do.  We’ve already talked about the fruit of the Spirit, Peter said in Chapter 1 verses 15 and 16 of his first letter, ‘that we are to be holy as He who called us is holy.’

So we’re to be humble, we’re to have hope and we’re to be holy people engaged in life; not some way out weird Christian that is in a subculture apart from this world, but in this culture touching people where they live, talking the truth of God and the truth of life.  You have a clear recognition of God, of you, engaged in life and then you are authentic.  This is very simple.  The people you are around have the sense that they are getting the real you.  Not a performance with an ulterior motive.

A simple way to think about that is when you share the gospel.  There have been times when I’ve shared the gospel out of guilt, and I’ll be in a conversation and I’ll find myself not even listening to the person in front of me, but maneuvering my words in conversation so I can get in the gospel presentation, and go home and tell somebody I did it.  That’s inauthentic.  That’s just one little way.  An authentic believer is one so engaged in life that when the opportunity to share the gospel comes up, it seems to be so apparently normal, truthful and genuine that a lost person is compelled to listen because they have seen you are engaged in real life and you are an authentic person.

Paul said in 2 Corinthians 4:2:

”We commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God.” 

Boy, wouldn’t you like to be able to say that!

In the same book, Chapter 12, Verse 14: [2 Corinthians] He said,

“I seek not what is yours, but you,” talking to the Corinthians.  Paul was authentic.

Jesus demanded authenticity because He told us ‘out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.’  In time our tongue will tell the truth of our soul.  People know you are authentic.

And a Christian is also someone that people describe as loving.  You say, Tony, this sounds like a different gospel.  No, this is the real gospel.  The Lord Jesus said that the first and greatest commandment is “to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.”  That is our primary purpose in all of life.  And then he said the second is like it, “to love your neighbor as yourself.”  So the chief mark of the Christian is love.  And love is not a feeling.  Love is based on fact.  It is driven by facts; facts that God loves you even though you were unlovable; facts that God demonstrates his love towards us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.  That frees us in humility, hope and holiness to be authentic towards people and to love them.  To love the people of the church, to love the people of the world, to love the people in our family and the people we work with.  That is a mark; actually that is the mark of a true Christian.

So, let’s review.  A Christian is one who:

Recognizes the difference between them and God and the only way to close that gap is the wonderful, amazing sacrifice of Christ on the cross.  Believing in that and His resurrection, that His life would come in you, that you give up all your hope of heaven and anything else in life and you lay it all on Christ, and based on that truth, then you engage into real life.

Christianity doesn’t disengage you from life, it engages you and then you are authentic.  It is the real you and you are marked by love.

So, I close with two questions?  Are you a Christian?  Based on what we’ve heard, are you a Christian?  Or, to ask it another way, Are you real?

God sent His Son on this earth, on this earth in time and space, he hung suspended between heaven and earth on a cross. Literally the sins of the world were placed on His shoulders.  Literally, God sends out the gospel call to the earth and Jesus calls all people to himself.  “Ye, who are weary and heavy-laden, come unto me and I’ll give you rest.”  Literally, He says all who come to me, any who come to me, I will in nowise cast out.” And, in truth, you must make a factual literal decision to say, “I’m a sinner, I trust Christ and Him alone to forgive me, I bow before Him as Lord and I receive Him as Lord and Savior. 

It’s not the words that are important.  It is the truth that you recognize and that you voice with your heart and with your mouth before God. He will save.  He does save.  The gospel is the power of God unto salvation.  Are you a Christian?  Have you asked Christ to save you?  Have you repented of your sins?  I want you to understand that we cannot grasp how the Lord Jesus is presently pleading through his Holy Spirit, come to Jesus Christ and be saved.  Don’t put it off.  If we can help you in any way, there are counselors who will be with us this morning who understand the gospel, will help you in walking through this.  We will be glad to help in any way. 

In a moment we’re going to sing, and, when we do, you can step out in that aisle during the hymn, you can walk forward and we’ll hook you up with one of the counselors.  If the morning time is not enough, we’ll set another appointment, we’ll come visit in your home; you can come to church and visit us.  We want you to understand how to answer the question, “Am I a Christian?” and how to answer it with a hearty, “Yes.”

 Let’s pray together.