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                      WHAT IS A BIBLICAL CHRISTIAN?
                           by Albert N. Martin

   Al Martin is pastor of Trinity Baptist Church, 116 Horseneck Road,
Montville, New Jersey 07045, U.S.A., and an Associate Editor of the
Banner of Truth magazine.  This address was given at the Banner of Truth
Youth Conference 1984.

   There are many matters concerning which total ignorance and complete
indifference are neither tragic nor fatal.  I believe many of you are
probably totally ignorant of Einstein's theory of relativity and if you
were asked to explain it to someone you would really be in a difficulty.
Not only are you ignorant of Einstein's theory of relativity, you are
probably quite indifferent, and that ignorance and indifference is
neither fatal nor tragic.  I am sure there are few of us who can explain
all the processes by which a brown cow eats green grass and gives white
milk.  It does not keep you from enjoying the milk.  But there are some
things concerning which ignorance and indifference are both tragic and
fatal and one such thing is the Bible's answer to the question I am about
to set before you.

   "What is a biblical Christian?"  In other words, when does a man or
woman, a boy or girl, have the right to take to himself or herself the
name Christian, according to the Scriptures?

   We do not want to make the assumption lightly that you are true
Christians.  I want to set before you four strands of the Bible's answer
to that question.

1.  ACCORDING TO THE BIBLE A CHRISTIAN IS A PERSON WHO HAS
    FACED REALISTICALLY THE PROBLEM OF HIS OWN PERSONAL SIN.

   Now one of the many unique things about the Christian faith is this
- unlike most of the religions of the world, Christianity is essentially
and fundamentally a sinner's religion.  When the angel announced to
Joseph the approaching birth of Jesus Christ, he did so in these words,
"Thou shalt call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people from their
sins" [Matt. 1:21].  The apostle Paul wrote in 1 Timothy 1.15, "This is a
faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into
the world to save sinners."  He came into the world to save sinners.  The
Lord Jesus Christ himself says in Luke 5:31-32, "Those that are healthy
do not need a doctor but those who are sick.  I did not come to call the
righteous, but sinners to repentance."  And the Christian is one who has
faced realistically this problem of his own personal sin.

   When we turn to the Scripture and seek to take in the whole of its
teaching on the subject of sin, right down to its irreducible minimum, we
find that the Scripture tells us that each one of us has a two-fold
personal problem in relation to sin.  On the one hand, we have the
problem of a bad record, and on the other, the problem of a bad heart.

If we start in Genesis 3 and read that tragic account of man's rebellion
against God and his fall into sin, then trace the biblical doctrine of
sin all the way through the Old Testament, and on into the New, right
through to the book of Revelation, we shall see that it is not over-
simplification to say that everything the Bible teaches about the
doctrine of sin can be reduced to those two fundamental categories
- the problem of a bad record and the problem of a bad heart.

   What do I mean by "the problem of a bad record?"  I am using that
terminology to describe what the Scripture sets before us as the doctrine
of human guilt because of sin.  The Scripture tells us plainly that we
obtained a bad record long before we had any personal existence here upon
the earth: "Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and
death by sin, and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned"
[Rom. 5:12].  When did the "all" sin?  We all sinned in Adam.  He was
appointed by God to represent all the human race and when he sinned we
sinned in him and fell with him in his first transgression.  That is why
the apostle writes in 1 Corinthians 15:22, "As in Adam all die."  We
passed our age of accountability in the Garden of Eden and from the
moment Adam sinned we were charged with guilt.  We fell in him in his
first transgression And we are part of the race that is under
condemnation.  Furthermore, the Scripture says, after we come into being
at our own conception and subsequent birth additional guilt accrues to us
for our own personal, individual transgressions.  The Word of God teaches
that there is not a just man upon the face of the earth who does good and
does not sin [Eccles. 7:20], and every single sin incurs additional
guilt.  Our record in heaven is a marred record.  Almighty God measures
the totality of our human experience from the moment of our birth by a
standard which is absolutely inflexible; a standard that touches not only
our external needs but also our thoughts and the very motions and
intentions of our hearts; so much so, that the Lord Jesus said that the
stirring of unjust anger is the very essence of murder, the look with the
intention to lust is adultery.  And God is keeping "a detailed record."

   That record is among "the books" which will be opened in the day of
judgement [Rev. 20:12].  And there in those books is recorded every
thought, every motive, every intention, every deed, every dimension of
human experience that is contrary to the standard of God's holy law,
either failing to measure up to its standards or transgressing it.  We
have the problem of a bad record - a record in which we are charged with
guilt; real guilt for real sin committed against the true and living God.

   That is why Scripture tells us that the entire human race stands guilty
before Almighty God [Rom 3:19].

   Has the problem of your own bad record ever become a burning,
pressing personal concern to you?  Have you faced the truth that Almighty
God judged you guilty when our first father sinned, and holds you guilty
for every  single word you have spoken contrary to perfect holiness and
justice and purity and righteousness?  He knows every object you have
touched and taken contrary to the sanctity of property and every word you
have spoken contrary to perfect, absolute truth.  Has this ever broken in
upon you, so that you awakened to the fact that Almighty God has every
right to summon you into his presence and to require you to give an
account of every single deed contrary to His law, which has brought guilt
upon your soul?

   Certainly we have the problem of a bad record but we have an
additional problem - the problem of a bad heart.  We are not only
pronounced guilty in the court of heaven for what we have done.  The
Scripture teaches that the problem of our sin is one that arises not only
from what we have done, but from what we are.  When Adam sinned he not
only became guilty before God, but defiled and polluted in his own
nature.  The Scripture describes it in Jeremiah 17.9, " The heart is
deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; who can know it?"

   Jesus describes it in Mark 7:21, "From within, out of the heart of man,
proceed..." and then He names all the various sins that can be seen in
any newspaper on any day - blasphemies, pride, adulteries, murder.  Jesus
said that these things rise out of the artesian well of pollution, the
human heart.  Notice carefully that he did not say, "For from without, by
the presence of society and its negative influences, come forth murder
and adultery and pride and thievery."  That is what our so-called
sociological experts tell us.  It is the "condition of society" that
produces crime and rebellion.  Jesus says it is the condition of the
human heart.  For from within, out of the heart, proceed these things -
lies, selfishness, self-centeredness, total pre-occupation with my
feelings and my desires and my plans and my perspectives.

   We have hearts that the Scripture describes as "desperately wicked"
- the fountain of all forms of iniquity.  To change the biblical imagery,
Romans 8:7 reads, "The carnal mind is enmity against God, for it is not
subject to the law of God, neither indeed can it be."  Paul says that the
carnal mind, that is, the mind that has never been regenerated by God, is
not reflective of some enmity; he calls it enmity itself.  "The carnal
mind is enmity against God."  The disposition of every human heart by
nature can be visually pictured as a clenched fist raised the living God.

   This is the inward problem of a bad heart - a heart that loves sin, a
heart that is the fountain of sin, a heart that is at enmity with God.

And such is the problem that every one of us has by nature.

   Has the problem of your bad heart ever become a pressing personal
concern to you?  I am not asking whether you believe in human sinfulness
in theory.  Oh, there is such a thing as a sinful nature and a sinful
heart.  My question is: Have your bad record and your bad heart ever
become a matter of deep, inward, personal, pressing concern to you?  Have
you known anything of real, personal, inward consciousness of the
awfulness of your guilt in the presence of a holy God? - the horribleness
of a heart that is "deceitful above all things and desperately wicked"?

   A Bible Christian is a person who has in all seriousness taken to
heart his own personal problem of sin.

   Now the degree to which we feel the awful weight of sin differs from
one person to another.  The length of time over which a person is brought
to the consciousness of his bad record and his bad heart differs.  There
are many variables, but Jesus Christ as the Great Physician never brought
his healing virtue to any who did not know themselves to be sinners.  He
said, "I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance"
[Matt. 9:13].  Are you a Bible Christian, one who has taken seriously
your personal problem of sin?

2.  A BIBLE CHRISTIAN IS ONE WHO HAS SERIOUSLY
    CONSIDERED THE ONE DIVINE REMEDY FOR SIN.

   In the Bible we are told again and again that Almighty God has taken
the initiative in doing something for man the sinner.  The verses some of
us learned in our infancy underscore divine initiative in providing a
remedy for sinful man: "God so loved the world that he gave his only
begotten Son..."; "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he
loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins"; "But God,
who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us..." [John
3:16; 1 John 4:10; Eph. 2:4].  You see, the unique feature of the
Christian faith is that it is not a kind of religious self-help where you
patch yourself up with the aid of God.  Just as surely as it is a unique
tenet of the Christian faith that Christ is a Savior for sinners, so it
is also a unique tenet of the Christian faith that all of our true help
comes down from above and meets us where we are.  We cannot pull
ourselves up by our own boot-strings.  God in mercy breaks in upon the
human situation and does something which we could never do for ourselves.

   Now when we turn to the Scripture we find that divine remedy has at least
three simple but profoundly wonderful focal points:

   (a)  First of all, that divine remedy is bound up in a Person.

Anyone who begins to take seriously the divine remedy for human sin will
notice in the Scripture that the remedy is not a set of ideas, as though
it were just another philosophy, nor is it found in an institution, it is
bound up in a Person.  "God so loved the world that he gave his only
begotten Son."  "Thou shalt call his name Jesus for he shall save..."

   He, himself, said, "I am the way, the truth and the life; no man comes to
the Father but by me" [John 14:6].  That one divine remedy is bound up in
a Person and that Person is none other than our Lord Jesus Christ - the
eternal Word who became man, uniting to his Godhead a true human nature.

   Here is God's provision for man with his bad record and his bad heart, a
Savior who is both God and man, the two natures joined in the one Person
for ever.  And your personal problem of sin, and mine, if it is ever to
be remedied in a biblical way will be remedied only as we have personal
dealings with that Person.  Such is the unique strand of the Christian
faith - the sinner in all his need united to the Savior in all the
plenitude of his grace, the sinner in his naked need and the Savior in
his almighty power, brought directly together in the Gospel.  That is the
glory of the Gospel!

   (b)  It is centered in the cross upon which that Person died.  A
cross that leads to an empty tomb, yes!  And a cross preceded by a life
of perfect obedience, yes!  And when we turn to the Scripture we find
that the divine remedy in a unique way is centered in the cross of Jesus
Christ.  When he is formally announced by John the Baptist, John points
to him and says, "Behold the Lamb of God who is bearing away the sins of
the world" [John 1:29].  Jesus himself said, "I did not come to be
ministered unto, but to minister and to give my life a ransom for many"
[Matt. 20:28], and true preaching of the Gospel is so much centered in
the cross that Paul says it is the word, or the message of the cross.

   The preaching of the cross is "to them who are perishing foolishness, but
unto us who are being saved it is the power of God" [1 Cor. 1:18], and
this same apostle went on to say that when he came to Corinth - that
bastion of intellectualism and pagan Greek philosophy with its set
patterns of rhetorical expertise - "I came amongst you determined to know
nothing save Jesus Christ and him as crucified" [1 Cor. 2:2].

   You see, God's gracious remedy for sin is not only bound up in a
Person, it is centered in the cross of that Person - not the cross as an
abstract idea, nor as a religious symbol, but the cross in terms of what
God declares it to mean.  The cross is the place where God heaped upon
his Son, by imputation, the sins of his people.  On that cross there was
substitutionary curse-bearing.  In the language of Galatians 3.13, "God
made him to be a curse for us"; "God made him to be sin for us" [2 Cor.
5:21] - the one who knew no sin.  It is not the cross as some nebulous,
indefinable symbol of self giving love, it is the cross as the monumental
display of how God can be just and still pardon guilty sinners; the cross
where God, having imputed the sins of his people to Christ, pronounces
judgment on his Son as the representative of his people.  There on the
cross God pours out the vials of his wrath, unmixed with mercy, until his
Son cries out, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?  Why have you
forsaken me?"  [Psalm 22.1; Matt. 27:46].  There in the visible world at
Calvary, God, as it were was demonstrating what was happening in the
invisible spiritual world.  He shrouds the heavens in total darkness to
let all mankind know that he is plunging his Son into the outer darkness
of the hell which your sins and my sins deserved.  Jesus hangs on the
cross in the place of an undefended guilty criminal; he is in the posture
of one for whom society has but one option, "Away with him," "Crucify
him," "Hand him over to death," and God does not intervene.  There in the
theater of what men can see, God is treating his Son as a criminal, he is
causing him to feel in the depths of his own soul all of the fury of the
wrath that should have been vented upon us.

   (c)  A remedy that is adequate for and offered to all without
discrimination.  Before we have felt any consciousness of our sin, about
the easiest thing in the world is to think that God can forgive sinners.

   But when you and I begin to have any idea at all of what sin is - we,
little worms of the dust, we creatures whose very life and breath is held
in the hands of the God in whom "we live and move and have our being"
[Acts 17:28] - when we begin, I say, to take seriously that we have dared
to defy Almighty God who holds our breath in his hands, the God who, when
angels rebelled against him, did not wait to show mercy but consigned
them to everlasting chains of darkness with no way of mercy ever planned
or revealed to them, then our thoughts are changed.  Once we take
seriously the truth that it is this holy God who sees the effusions of
the foul, corrupt human hearts which are yours and mine, then we say, "O
God, how can you be anything other than just; and if you give me what my
sins deserve, there is nothing for me but wrath and judgement!  How can
you forgive me and still be just?  How can you be a righteous God and do
anything other than consign me to everlasting punishment with those
angels that rebelled."  When you begin to take your sin seriously,
forgiveness becomes the most knotty problem with which your mind has ever
wrestled.  It is then that we need to know that God has provided in a
Person, and that Person crucified, a remedy that is adequate for and
offered to all without discrimination.  When God begins to make us feel
the reality of or sin, if there were any conditions placed on the
availability of Christ we would say, "Surely I don't meet the conditions,
surely I don't qualify," but the wonder of God's provision is that it
comes in these unfettered terms: "Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the
waters; he who has no money, come, buy wine and milk without money and
without price.  Wherefore do you labour for that which does not satisfy "
[Isa. 55:1-2].  "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden,
and I will give you rest.  Him that comes unto me I will in no wise cast
out" [Matt. 11:28; John 6:37].

   Oh, the beauty of the unfettered offers of mercy in Jesus Christ!

   We do not need to have God step out of heaven and tell us that we, by
name, are warranted to come; we have the unfettered offers of mercy in
the words of his own Son, "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy
laden, and I will give you rest."

3.  A BIBLE CHRISTIAN IS ONE WHO HAS WHOLEHEARTED COMPLIED WITH
    THE DIVINE TERMS FOR APPROPRIATING THE DIVINE PROVISION.

   The divine terms are two - repent and believe.  That is what Jesus
preached, "At that time Jesus came preaching, Repent and believe the
gospel" [Mark 1:15-16].  It is what Paul preached.  He says, "I testified
to Jews and Greeks wherever I went, repentance toward God, faith toward
our Lord Jesus Christ" [Acts 20:21].  This is the Gospel that Jesus told
his own to preach [Luke 24:45-46].  He opened their minds to understand
the Scripture and told them it was necessary for Christ to die, and to be
raised again from the dead the third day, that repentance unto remission
of sins should be preached in his name among all the nations, beginning
at Jerusalem.

   What are the divine terms for obtaining the divine provision?  We
must repent, we must believe.  Now because we have to speak in terms of
one word following another, or preceding another, we must not think that
this repentance is divorced from faith or that this faith is ever
divorced from repentance.  True faith is permeated with repentance, true
repentance is permeated with faith.  They inter-penetrate one another so
that, whenever there is a true appropriation of the divine provision,
there you will find a believing penitent and penitent believer.  The one
will never be divorced from the other.

   What is repentance?  The definition of the Shorter Catechism is an
excellent one: "Repentance unto life is a saving grace, whereby a sinner,
out of a sense of his sin, and apprehension of (that is, a laying hold
of) the mercy of God in Christ, does with grief and hatred of his sin,
turn from it unto God, with full purpose of, and endeavoring after, new
obedience."

   Repentance is the prodigal down in the far country coming to his
senses.  He left his father's home because he could not stand his
father's government.  Everything about his father's will and ways
irritated him.  It was a constant block to following the desires of his
own foul, wretched, sin-loving heart.  The day came when he said he
wanted what was due him.  He went into the far country.  When he left he
had a notion of his father, of his government and of his ways, which was
entirely negative, but the Scripture tells us in Luke 15 that down in the
far country he came to himself: "And when he came to himself he said, I
will arise and go to my father and will say unto him, Father, I have
sinned against heaven, and before you, and am no more worthy to be called
your son.  Make me as one of your hired servants."  And then the
Scripture says he did not sit there and think about it, and write poetry
about it and send telegrams home to Dad.  It says, "He rose up and came
to his father."  He left all those companions who were his friends in
sin; he loathed and abominated and abhorred everything that belonged to
that lifestyle.  He turned his back on it.  And what was it that drew him
home?  It was the confidence that there was a gracious father with a
large heart and with the righteous rule for his happy, loving home.  And
he said, "I will arise and go to my father."  He did not send a telegram
saying, "Dad, things are getting rough down here; my conscience is giving
me fits at night; won't you send me some money to help me out and come
and pay me a visit and make me feel good?"  Not at all!  He did not need
just to feel good, he needed to become good.  And he left the far
country.  It is a beautiful stroke in our Lord's picture when he says,
"While he was yet a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion,
and ran, and threw his arms around him and kissed him."  The prodigal did
not come strutting up to his father, talking about making a decision to
come home.  There is a notion that people can come strutting into enquiry
rooms and pray their little prayer and so do God a favour by making their
decision.  This has no more to do with conversion then my name is
"Abraham Lincoln."  True repentance involves recognizing that I have
sinned against the God of heaven, who is great and gracious, holy and
loving, and that I am not worthy to be called his son.  And yet, when I
am prepared to leave my sin, to turn my back upon it and to come back
haltingly, wondering if indeed there can be mercy for me, then - wonder
of wonders! - the Father meets me, and throws the arms of reconciling
love and mercy about me.  I say it not in a sentimental way but in all
truth, he smothers repenting sinners in forgiving and redemptive love.

   But note, the father did not throw his arms around the prodigal when
he was still in the hog pens and in the arms of harlots.  Do I speak to
some whose hearts are wedded to the world, who love the world's ways?

   Perhaps in your personal life, or in relationship to your parents, or in
your social life where you take so lightly the sanctity of the body, you
show what you are.  Maybe some of you are involved in fornication, in
heavy petting, in looking at the kind of stuff on television and in the
cinema that feeds your lust, and yet you name the name of Christ.  You
live in the hog pens and then go to the house of God on Sunday.  Shame on
you!  Leave your hog pens, your haunts of sin.  Leave your patterns and
practices of fleshly and carnal indulgence.  Repentance is being sorry
enough to quite your sin.  You will never know the forgiving mercy of God
while you are still wedded to your sins.

   Repentance is the soul's divorce from sin but it will always be
joined to faith.  What is faith?  Faith is the casting of the soul upon
Christ as he is offered to us in the gospel.  Forsaking All I Take Him.

   That is faith!  "As many as received him, to them gave he the right to
become the sons of God, even to them that believe in his name" [John
1:12].  Faith is likened to drinking of Christ.  In my soul-thirst I
drink of him.  Faith is likened to looking to Christ.  Faith is likened
to following Christ, fleeing to Christ.  The Bible uses many analogies
and the sum of them all is this, that in the nakedness of my need I cast
myself upon the Savior, trusting him to be to me all that he has promised
to be to needy sinners.

   Faith is taking nothing to Christ but an empty hand by which it
takes Christ and all that is in him.  And what is in him?  Full pardon
for all my sins!  His perfect obedience is put to my account.  His death
is counted as mine.  And the gift of the Spirit is in him.  Adoption,
sanctification and ultimately glorification are all in him, and faith, in
taking Christ, receives all that is in him.  "But of him are ye in Christ
Jesus, whom God has made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and
sanctification and redemption" [1 Cor. 1:30].

   What is a biblical Christian?  A biblical Christian is a person who
has wholeheartedly complied with the divine terms for obtaining the
divine provision for sin.  Those terms are repentance and faith.  I like
to think of them as the hinge on which the door of salvation turns.  The
hinge has two plates.  One that is screwed to the door and the other
screwed to the door jam.  They are held together by a pin and on that
hinge the door turns.  Christ is that door, but none enter through him
who do not repent and believe, and there is no true hinge made up only of
repentance.  A repentance that is not joined to faith is a legal
repentance.  It terminates on yourself and on your sin.

   A professed faith that is not joined to repentance is a spurious
faith, for faith is faith in Christ to save me, not in but from my sin.

   Repentance and faith are inseparable, and except you repent you will
perish.  He that believeth not shall be damned.

4.  A BIBLE CHRISTIAN IS A PERSON WHO MANIFESTS IN HIS LIFE
    THAT HIS CLAIMS TO REPENTANCE AND FAITH ARE REAL.

   Paul said that he preached that men should repent and turn to God
and do works meet for, answering to, consistent with, repentance [Acts
26:20].  "By grace are you saved through faith, and that not of
yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should
boast.  For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good
works which God before ordained that we should walk in them" [Eph.
2:8-10].  Paul says in Galatians chapter 5, that faith works by love.

   Wherever there is true faith in Christ there will always be implanted
genuine love to Christ and where there is love to Christ there will
always be obedience to Christ.  True faith always works by love, and what
does it work?  A life of obedience!  "He that has my commandments, and
keeps them, he it is that loves me.  He that loves me not keeps not my
sayings" [John 14:21-24].  We are not saved by loving Christ, we are
saved by trusting Christ, but a trust that produces no love is not real.

   True faith works by love, and that which love works is not the ability to
sit on a beautiful starlight night writing poetry about how exiting it is
to be a Christian.  It works by causing you to go back into that home and
to obey your father and mother as the Bible tells you to do, or back to
that university campus to take a stand for truth and righteousness
against all the pressure of your peers.  True faith makes you willing and
prepared to be counted a fool and crazy, willing to be considered
anachronistic, because you believe that there are eternal, unchangeable,
moral and ethical standards.  You are willing to believe in the sanctity
of human life, and to take your stand against pre-marital sex and the
murdering of babies in mothers' wombs.  For Jesus said, "Whoever shall be
ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation,
of him shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he comes in the glory of his
Father with the holy angels" [Mark 8:38].  What is a Bible Christian?

   Not one who merely says, "Oh, yes, I know I am a sinner, with a bad
record and a bad heart.  I know that God's provision for sinners is in
Christ and in his cross, adequate, freely offered to all, and I know it
comes to all who repent and believe."  That is not enough.  Do you
profess to repent and believe?  Then can you make that profession stick,
not by a life of perfection but by a life of purposeful obedience to
Jesus Christ?  "Not everyone who says unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter
the kingdom of heaven," Jesus said, "but he who is doing the will of my
Father who is in heaven" [Matt. 7:21].  In Hebrews 5:8 we read, "He
became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey him."  And in John
2:4, "He that says, I know him, and keeps not his commandments is a liar,
and the truth is not in him."

   Can you make your claim to be a Christian stick from the Bible?

   Does your life manifest the fruits of repentance and faith?  Do you
possess a life of attachment to Christ, of obedience to Christ and
confession of Christ?  Is your behavior marked by adherence to the ways
of Christ?  Not perfectly - No!  Every day you must pray, "Forgive us our
sins as we forgive those who trespass against us."  But you can also say,
"For me to live is Christ," or "Jesus I my cross have taken.  All to
leave and follow thee.  The world behind me, the cross before me, I have
decided to follow Jesus."  That is what a true Christian is.  How many of
us are real Christians?  I leave the answer in the deep chambers of your
own mind and heart.  But, remember, answer with an answer that you will
be prepared to live with for eternity.  Be content with no answer but
that which will find you comfortable in the death and safe in the day of
judgement.

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   The following comments are not part of the original text but were
added by me (Gary Duncan).

   You will notice in statement #4 it gets down to where you live,
we're not talking about what you do in your heart where no one can see
(except God) but we're talking right out here in the open.  Let's take a
deeper look at what the Bible has to say about some of these things and
others that we could encounter on a day-to-day basis.

   First, as it states in the text, the Bible tells us to obey our
parents (even when you don't think there are being fair!).  "Children
obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right."  "Honor your father
and mother"- which is the first commandment with a promise-" [Eph.
6:1-2].  Now let me ask you, does it say to obey only when you want to or
when you feel that they are being fair?  No, it just says OBEY.  Does it
say or imply that this only applies if your parents are saved?  Again no,
it just says OBEY.  Now that does not mean that if they tell you to do
something that is obviously contrary to God that you must do it.  Now
another question, for us older folks: Are you still your parents
children?  If you do not have your own family, then yes you are.  "For
this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his
wife" (Gen. 2:24).

   Now, how about standing for the cause?  Sometimes that's
uncomfortable, right?  We are told that we are to conform our selves to
the image of Christ.  Which would mean following his example, and
responding to things the way Christ would respond.  If Christ were in
body among us today, do you think he would respond to abortion the way so
many "Christians" do today?  Or what about the divorce rate among
"Christians."  What do you think the Lord's response to that would be?

   "Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for
there is no authority except that which God has established.  The
authorities that exist have been established by God.  Consequently, he
who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has
instituted, and those who do so will bring judgement upon themselves"
(Romans 13:1-2).  What does this say to you?  To me this says that I
better obey the laws of the land, because if I break the law of the land
I am rebelling against God!  Now of course we all know that we should not
break the big laws; murder, stealing, etc., but what about the "small"
laws?  I don't think it specifies in that passage that we are to obey
only the ones that seem important.  One thing I see almost every day that
grieves me to no end: I'll be driving down the highway and this car goes
speeding passed me going at least 10 mph over the speed limit, and as
this car passes me I see bumper stickers on the car that imply that the
owner/driver is a Christian.  Now some people say that they have to give
you 5 mph over, that's not true.  Speeding is breaking the law, period.

   And my Bible says that breaking the law is rebelling against what God has
instituted and for that matter against God himself.

   As Christians we are not to be conformed to the world, which of
course means that it doesn't matter if everyone else is doing it, if its
wrong its wrong.  I think most everyone would agree that the easiest way
to witness to somebody is if they come up and ask you a question.  Before
they will ask a question they have to see something different in your
life that they like, and if we live like they do, we show them that we
are just like they are, and they are not going to ask us what is
different in our life.

   Being a Christian is more than just having a title.  Being a
Christian is living a life.  Along with the other items that pastor
Martin talked about in his message.

    In Christ,
   Gary Duncan