Being a Christian

 


 We're always classifying people. aren't we? At least in our own minds., if not verbally. People are young or ; male or female; and so on. We divide people up on the basis of their skin, and on a whole lot of other things. Yet in God's eyes all these things are totally insignificant. What matters in his sight is this: Does a person believe in his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ: has he (or she) come to the Cross in repentance, and for forgiveness? This is the one thing that matters
  Today there are countless voices telling us that that doesn't matter; and that, thereby, to insist on it is being g narrowly fundamental. Paul's words in Colossians 2:8-15 are bang up-to-date! V8:
Be on your guard; do not let your minds be captured by hollow or delusive speculations, based on the traditions of man-made teachings and centred on the elemental spirits of the universe and not on Christ.
Paul was captured by the rock-certainty of what Christ had done, and was sold-out to him. He was concerned for God's truth alone, the truth given to us by our God who cares for us and preserved for us in his word.
He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son does not have life (1 John 5:12)
The Apostle John, like Paul, knew no equivocation. Listen again to Paul:
The message of the Cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God (1 Cor 1:18)
The Scripture writers echo God's heart and mind. All that matters is: Is a person a Christian or not? has he or she believed on the Lord Jesus Christ, and been adopted into God's family. This is Paul's first point: that we're not led astray from the centrality of Christ.
 

His second concern is with the change that occurs when a person believes and becomes a Christian- and that is God's work. In Him (Christ) you have been brought to completion (v10)- or as the NIV has it 'you have been given'. These are things which God does for us, which God gives us. If you,ve ever listened to the teaching tapes of Roger Price then you'll know that 37 things happen the instant a person becomes a Christian. Here, I would say, Paul points out the salient ones, and I'd like to spend a little time with them. And let's note- if we've believed, then these things have happened to us and can never un-happen!

1. V11: you were divested of your lower nature.
Paul is at the point of making a contrast with Jewish rite of circumcision and the spiritual circumcision of those 'in Christ'. He was wanting them to see that there was nothing for them to put their trust in in a purely religious ritual. True that circumcision was God's ordinance, but God's real desire was that people would (Deut 10:16) circumcise (their) hearts and (not be) stiff-necked any longer.
  Paul is wanting us to see that everyone born has this 'lower nature', which is the root of all the sin and evil in the world. For we are all born with that tendency to rebel against God. Why do people made by God, and in his image, care so little for the things of God and his will and commands? Why do so many people use God's name only as an expletive- have you ever asked yourself why these things happen?
  There is that in our nature which is offensive to God, so that even our righteousness, even our 'good deeds' are to God but filthy rags (Isa 64:6) We don't like to think about this in-born corruption of our human nature. So Paul is that that nature which which we are born is like clothing that has to be stripped off, and we don't even see their need, still less have the ability. Only in and by Christ can it be done and it's just this which is the first thing God does. When anyone becomes a Christian, they are a new creation (2 Cor 5:17), so that people ask: "What's happened to you?"
  Paul goes on to speak about baptism. I think Paul would want to say that any rite of baptism is of no value unless it signifies or is followed by that total change of heart which only comes about by belief in the Lord Jesus Christ.
  In verse12 we read:

In baptism you were buried with him, in baptism also you were raised to new life.
Learned commentators argue about whether Paul meant water baptism or Spirit-baptism. If we go down that road we miss the real point. Just as God desired of his Old Covenant people a circumcision of heart, so he wants of us a renewal of heart. What was wrong with human nature cannot be improved upon: it has to be totally done away with. And the real point here is that baptism can also signify identification. Paul is speaking about our being identified with the Lord Jesus Christ. So that his burial becomes our burial: his rising becomes our rising too. Burial is a public declaration that a life is over. Baptism is the declaration our godless way of life is over.    God does something wonderful. He says "Your life is over! You're buried!"
  Friends! We're all buried; we've all had our funeral! Do you get it? That way of life which God found so offensive is over never to return and haunt us! (Though sometimes we let sin or memory do that!) We now live Christ's risen life; never to die again. God says we won't even taste physical death. Billy Graham tells of his mother's death. As the end approached she saw Jesus She became so enraptured with him that her physical death was a non-event. We are buried and alive with Christ. What a difference it might make to some of us if we really believed that. Romans 6:6 says We know; again in verse 9. What God has done is true whether we know it or not! Let's seek the Lord, if need be for a revelation of that truth.  You were divested of your lower nature.. Then:

2. Verse 13. Although you were dead because of your sins...God made you alive with Christ. For he has forgiven all our sins
God is holy and sinless and sin and a holy God cannot exist together any more than oil and water. So many people see life full of its 'joys and pleasures'. They live for themselves without any reckoning of God and glibly think that when they die they will go to heaven. The truth is that if they got there they would find it such that they could not stand it for one instant. How could someone whose life had been full of possessions and pleasure and drink and sex find any pleasure in the presence of a holy God? Equally, people whose lives are bound by their own mean-ness and concerns; whose horizons are bounded by self?
  In short and in the language of Scripture, there are so many dead people all around us. They walk, they talk, they eat, they watch their TVs, but they're dead. They're dead in their sins, cut off from the very life of God. All these people can do, is wait for their bodies to die and face the second death which (Rev 20:11) is the lake of fire. If you will, there's a spiritual law which says, "At the end everyone is either once born and twice dead, or twice born and once dead."
There is but one hope. For such was our state once. God, such is his mercy, his grace and his love has made us alive with Christ. He has forgiven all our sins. All that stood between us and the Lord and blotted out his life has been put away. Forgiven, never to be remembered, never to be had in mind. If you take a computer-disk, full of information and, to use the technical term, re-format it you will wipe off every scrap of information; never to be recovered, gone for good.

I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions... and remembers your sin no more (Isa 43:25)
The Cross was the place where your sins and mine were carried away; carried away by the Lord Jesus Christ. I often feel that the darkness of those last three hours on the Cross signify that God could not bear to look on his Son as he took our sin and its ugliness upon him and cried out My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Matt 27:46)
O wonder of wonders
  that through thy death for me,
my open sin, my secret sin,
  can all forgotten be.

Help me to understand it
  help me to take it in:
what it meant to Thee, the Holy One
  to bear away my sin.

No wonder Paul's one purpose in life was the Gospel and Christ crucified. Because he believed, he knew God had forgiven him and given him a new life and wiped his sin out. And his one aim was to carry this gospel to as many as he could. Oh that we had but a fraction of Paul's total consumption with Christ and the Gospel !

3.  Verse 14. He has cancelled the bond which pledged us to the decrees of the law. It stood against us, but he has set it aside, nailing it to the Cross.
Every human society has its laws. We speak of 'law and order'. Behind this fact is this, that God's laws are there to restrain that sinful lower nature that every man and woman is born with. One of the most worrying features of today's society is the growth of lawlessness. A while ago there was a news report about a 14-year-old girl 'joy rider'. She was careering round the streets of north London at 70mph. The police gave chase. Eventually the car went out of control and, tragically, the girl was killed. What stuck me about the news report was the thinly veiled criticism of the police for giving chase
  We are born under God's law, and that law, whether we regard it or not, condemns us- and we want to blame God for its enforcement! Part of the Gospel is that, on the Cross, the Lord Jesus Christ fulfilled the just requirement of God's law. So the third thing that happens as we believe is that we are free of the demand and condemnation of the law. On the Cross, Paul is saying, the 'handwriting' of the law was rubbed out; not that the law was done away with. God, need I add, does require right and holy living of us. But we no longer live with the fear of the law and its consequences. Who will bring any charge against those God has chosen? asks Paul (Rom 8:33), and answers, It is God who justifies . We are delivered by the love of the Father. It was what John was on about when he spoke of love casting out fear; that fear has to do with punishment. But God's perfect law removes  that fear of punishment.

4 Verse 15. On the Cross he divested the cosmic powers and authorities and led them captive in his triumphal procession.

When a Roman general returned home after a victory he was given a victory procession. In triumph, he would lead the procession, followed by his soldiers, and, at the end of the procession as a public spectacle and object of scorn and ridicule, some of those he had taken captive. Such is the picture we are presented with here and elsewhere in the New Testament.
  The world, and those born into it, are under the control of the Evil One and his cosmic powers and authorities: in language redolent of Ephesians 6. In 1 John, in fact, we are told (3:10) that we were children of the devil. But again it's John who uses the language of contrast. Now we are children of God.
  On the Cross the Lord Jesus Christ was victor over the Devil: the Cross is the mark of his victory. The Devil must tag along at the back of the procession. He may try and tell us we are still under his control: we may, sadly, by sin give him a foothold (Eph 4:27). We are engaged in spiritual warfare.

But, we are Christ's; we are God's children, no longer the Devil's. We are not in a power struggle. The Devil is also a deceiver. Our need is to stand on and establish the truth in the struggle. The truth is the Devil is defeated by Christ, whose we are. We remind the Devil of the Cross; that we have been transferred from the Devil's kingdom to that of God's dear Son, and that every power and authority in the universe will ultimately be subject to him.

We can rejoice as we think of some of the wonderful things that our God has wrought in us:

We thought at the outset of all that is arrayed against us that would deny these great truths. For take away the centrality of Christ and that essential difference God sees between the believer and the non-believer and all the rest goes. All the world offers is vulnerable, shaking, unsure. Let us end by recalling the words of that great hymn by John Henry Newman: