Conversion: New Life

When we would play pickup basketball, players would exchange jerseys to make the teams fair. This could be confusing when someone who was previously on your team would suddenly be playing against you.  However, the jerseys could be readily exchanged again as players come and go.

When the Bible talks about following Jesus, it is more than putting on a "Jesus" jersey when the church is open or when other Christians are around.  No, it is much, much more, as these texts describe:

Colossians 3 says, "Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God."  

Romans 6 describes our old lives as being buried like a dead body with the dead body of Jesus.  Then, we are raised to new life with him in his resurrection.  

Galatians 5 describes some of the various characteristics of the dead life: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these.  Then Paul describes the characteristics (fruits) of the new life, a life lived by God's Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

All too often, a person will claim to have become a Christian at some moment in the past, but live like a spiritually dead person.  It's the same as a corpse that has been propped up with a birth certificate pinned to its clothes and a note that says "Alive."  Yet by the smell and lack of life, the corpse is still dead.  In the same way that living proves you are alive, so walking in the Spirit, setting one's mind on the things of Christ, exhibiting the Spirit's fruits, shows you are truly alive!

Who knows you well enough to see the lists above and testify to your new life in Christ?  

Do you know anyone honest enough to tell you?  

Could you be honest enough with yourself to accept the possibility that you may not be a Christian by the Bible's standards?

This is an important question to wrestle with, and one that church membership is meant to help us answer.  We'll explore how in the coming weeks.

Together for your assurance of faith in Christ,

Loren