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2 – Why am I now a Christian

By / New Christian Helps / 11 minutes of reading

As Christians, it’s important for us to understand why God gifted us with salvation? Understanding the purpose for your salvation will help motivate you to follow Jesus faithfully and obediently.

We suggest pausing throughout this lesson to read the Bible passages that are referenced but not quoted. By doing this you will maximise the impact of God’s Word in your life. Also, write extra notes that will help you to remember the lessons learned. It is also helpful to highlight verses in your Bible that impact you. We suggest using coloured pencils or a fine-tipped pen. As a secondary tool, a Bible App can be helpful also.

Some common questions new Christians ask:

  • Was salvation simply so I could receive eternal life and carry on living the way I want?
  • Does salvation mean that God works all things for my enjoyment in this life?
  • Now that I’ve said the sinner’s prayer, does that mean that I go to heaven following a life of doing as I please and God giving me everything I ask for?
  • Does being a Christian mean that I have to give up things I really like?
  • Now that I’ve confessed to being a sinner, will God take all my problems away?
  • Does God have a purpose for me as a Christian?

These questions are clearly answered in the Bible. However, the most important question in the above list, is the last one; “Does God have a purpose for me as a Christian?” In this lesson we shall focus on answering this single question.

The answer is YES! God has a definite purpose for you now that you are a Christian. Salvation is simply the beginning of your adventure with Jesus Christ. In fact, God’s purpose for you existed long before you were even born.

God determined from eternity past for you to respond favourably to Him through putting faith in His Son Jesus Christ. Consequently, you believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit and became an expression of the praise of his glory (Ephesians 1:13-14). That has always been God’s unchanging purpose for your life in Christ. Everything about you, including your strengths and weaknesses, along with any future struggles or problems, have become a living, breathing, moving, public statement of his glorious grace (Ephesians 1:6).

This means, everything that makes you the unique person that you are, is intended by God for living out the loving grace of Jesus Christ. Our purpose as Christians is for God to get all the recognition, all the thanks, and all the glory for what He has done and continues to do in our lives.

Believers in Jesus Christ are his [God’s] workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them (Ephesians 2:10). Long before we showed any interest in Jesus, the Lord was arranging good works that He wanted us to be busy with following salvation. Nothing could be left to chance, and nothing could be left to our questionable motives when it comes to our Christian works.

The apostle Peter explains that believers in Jesus are a people for his [God’s] own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light (1 Peter 2:9). Because we belong to Jesus, we tell others how excellent Jesus is. Therefore, we are careful not to allow ourselves to become distracted because it is our aim to please him in all areas of life (2 Corinthians 5:9).

If you have entrusted your life to Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, there are three basic stages of life which God has planned for you in advance.

God planned your salvation
King David observed that the Lord created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb (Psalm 139:13). You were not an accident. Even if your parents did not plan your birth, God did. God was in control of your life from the very beginning within your mother’s womb. The earthly circumstances of your inception were reasoned through and measured by God. Your inception did not escape God’s attention, no matter what the circumstances were. We are the product of God’s will, even if we do not understand how this can be, God states this as fact.

Earlier David said of God, you hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me (Psalm 139:5). You see, David understood that it was God who invisibly moved his life into the right places and connected him to the people of God’s choice. Despite David’s wrong decisions at times, and his periods of resistance, God did everything necessary to get David to where God wanted him.

Likewise, God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8). God was graciously working on our salvation long before we realised what was going on. You and I contributed nothing to our salvation. Even when we were dead in our trespasses, [God] made us alive together with Christ… (Ephesians 2:5). Salvation was always outside of our grasp or control. Here we see God’s patient and determined grace at work. God never gave up on us, even though there would have been many times when we would have rejected Him.

Because we sinners were dead in the trespasses and sins of our lives (Ephesians 2:1), we were not able to choose to believe in Jesus as Lord and Saviour. You see, dead people don’t think, and they don’t realise that they are dead, because they are dead. They don’t desire to be alive because they are unable to reason their way out of being spiritually dead. So, God steps in and works on our behalf to make it possible for us to believe. Every intricate phase of coming to faith in Jesus was accommodated by God. Yet, we think that we did it; we reasoned through it, we chose to exercise our will to believe, and we repented. We did it. Correct! Which is precisely what God wanted and God enabled you and I to do. This is why God gets the praise!

Jesus explained to His disciples that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father (John 6:65). Did I not choose you? Jesus told His disciples (John 6:70). You are a gift from God the Father to God the Son, chosen by God Himself.

But here is an even more wonderful thing that stretches our minds past our ability to fully understand. God did this by giving us the required faith so that we could believe in Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God (Ephesians 2:8). Because you and I were dead in sin, and dead people have no faith, God graciously gifted us with the faith that we needed for us to believe in the Lord Jesus.

God left nothing to chance when it came to getting dead sinners to receive eternal life. In John 1:12-13, Jesus tells us that as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

  • We chose to receive Jesus through believing in Jesus – that was our responsibility.
  • It was Jesus who entitled us, He gave us the right to be born again (John 3:3) into God’s family as God’s children.
  • Salvation was not the result of our human will, or of our human efforts, but it was an act of God’s will.
  • It was Jesus who made it possible for God’s will to be done in our sinful lives.

If you picture in your mind, God’s will and your belief working together it will help you to grow in appreciation of how the Lord accomplished your salvation. God made it possible for you to believe in harmony with His plan for your salvation. God was engaged with you to produce the outcome of your surrendered belief in Jesus as Lord and forgiver of your sin. This was God’s determined intention for you all along.

To use a human illustration, imagine two gears spinning. If we move those two gears towards each other until they touch, there would be lots of noise, sparks, and broken pieces flying off as they crashed. That’s what God’s will and our disbelief would have been like if God did not arrange everything that was needed for both to work together.

Now, imagine those same two gears being meshed in synchronisation before they begin to spin. The outcome is obvious. They work together in perfect harmony while rotating. No crashing, just harmony. In this illustration, God is the one who precisely knows everything that is happening with both parties. While we, with extremely limited understanding, only perceive our side of the events.

This simplistically illustrates God’s ingenious and gracious nature. He graciously brings His control into sinful mankind by enabling sinners to intelligently express faith through their individual characters as they willingly believe in Jesus as Saviour and Lord. They do this without realising that they are believing in conjunction with God’s will for them. Later, they look back, and see how God was working in their lives all along and they were simply following His lead.

God planned your life for usefulness
As mentioned earlier in Ephesians 2:10, Paul explained that we are his [God’s] workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. While good works do not provide our salvation, they are the product of salvation. Jesus says in John 15:8, by this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. Our good works give evidence of Christ being active in our lives.

The Lord intends us to walk with Him each day as willing and obedient participants. God wants us to live in such a way that we express the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22), doing good works produced by Christlike character, as opportunity permits.

The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps (Proverbs 16:9). We plan our lives, sometimes other people attempt to alter our plans, and even unexpected circumstances may affect our plans. But it’s God who determines and adjusts the outcome and the long-term results of our plans to fulfil His will and maximise our eternal blessing.

The apostle Paul even acknowledges God’s purposes in the painful times of life (1 Thessalonians 3:3-4). No circumstance in your life is wasted by God as He joins His purposes with the events of your life for His glory. Included in this is our capacity to serve Him through the daily events and relationships of life. Paul instructed Timothy that through God’s Word, believers are equipped for every good work (2 Timothy 3:16-17).

Without realising it, through your ordinary day to day life, it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure (Philippians 2:13). He is partnered with you constantly for His pleasure and your blessing. He has calculated all the possibilities and even made allowances for your weaknesses, mistakes, and failings. He does this for the purpose of keeping His plans for your life on track, even if we cannot see it at the time. Every day, every event, every relationship, has purpose and meaning, therefore, they all have value.

In God’s kindness, He has connected you with Christian friends who will be able to assist you to grow in your Christian life through the pleasant and difficult times. Together, you will be a comfort and a strength to each other as you walk the life of faith together. Study the Bible together, pray together, worship together, fellowship together, and serve together. All these will become the source of usefulness with meaning and value in your Christian life.

God planned your heavenly home
Romans 8:30 tells us that those whom he [God] predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified. God’s intention is to get you to heaven. No matter what happens in this life, believers have the hope of heaven and God is committed to getting us there.

The believer’s heavenly destination is as certain as their salvation. It is God alone who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy… (Jude 1:24). As with all of us, there will be difficult times in life when you will struggle, but Jesus Christ is the one who gives you the inner strength to continue to the end of this earthly walk. His purpose is to introduce you into heaven with great joy as God’s child who has been cleansed and prepared by Jesus Himself.

Jesus explained it this way to His disciples, this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day (John 6:40). No-one can take Jesus’ gift of eternal life from you. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand (John 10:28-29). Christian, you are safe in Jesus Christ! Both God the Father and God the Son have a firm grip on you. Both Father and son are determined to use all their power to get you into their heavenly presence. Nothing can change that!

Conclusion
We have thought about some big things in this lesson. While we trust God’s Word completely, we ask that the Lord grow our understanding of how these truths work out in our lives, so, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:31).

Why am I now a Christian?

The answer is, to bring God pleasure and glory!

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If you would like to ask a question, please use the “Contact Us” page on our web site, https://focusbiblechurch.com/contact-us/

 

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God of Pleasure

By / The Pastor's Pen / 3 minutes of reading

It continues to be an irony of this age; although there is so much suffering and deprivation around the world, the world remains hedonistic. Being self-indulgent and pleasure seeking is the god of so many, for which they are willing to sacrifice so much. Those who pursue pleasure without restraint tend to see God as boring and lifeless, one who robs mankind of fun. Yet, nothing could be further from the truth. Mankind is only capable of pleasure because he was created in the image of God who, likewise, experiences pleasure (Gen 1:27).

God’s point of difference is that He does not sacrifice holiness to experience pleasure. Participation in sin is never Yahweh’s path to enjoyment. Psalm 5:4 declares, You are not a God who delights in wickedness; evil does not sojourn with You. Holiness is the cornerstone of everything God is and does. Holiness is the foundation on which His pleasure stands. Moses testified of the LORD, …who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders? (Exodus 15:11).

The greatest thoughts any Christian can have, are how to glorify God and bring Him pleasure. This was the very purpose of our spiritual rebirth into Christ. In fact, God went to extraordinary lengths in predestining us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will (Ephesians 1:5). Believers are the direct result of God’s will and God’s pleasure. What a wonderful and reassuring thought. While the devil mutters his lies of self-importance and discontentment with life, Yahweh proclaims that you are the materialisation of His pleasure. So, the Almighty moved heaven and earth to accomplish your salvation, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit (Titus 3:5). Nothing was left to chance or to our fleshly wills.

John 1:12-13 states that all who did receive him (Jesus), who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. This spectacular truth should lift us above the mondain, above the superficial, and above the frivolous and depressing thoughts of this world. Understandably then, the LORD takes pleasure in his people; He adorns the humble with salvation (Psalm 149:4).

Living in the sweetness of knowing that Jesus Christ has enlivened your capacity to glorify God and bring Him pleasure should direct our hearts to living which exemplifies Christlike character. David prayed, I know, my God, that you test the heart and have pleasure in uprightness… (1 Chronicles 29:17). Like David, our righteous living in Christlike character is a source of pleasure to God.

God’s Word is not shy in explaining that believers get pleasure when they give God pleasure. So, we make it our aim to please him (2 Corinthians 5:9). Therefore, we are to walk as children of light, for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true, and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord (Ephesians 5:8-10).

Here we should pause, bringing together two great truths for His glory and our blessing.
1) As a Christian, you exist because God acted to make you an expression of His glory and pleasure.
2) As a Christian, you live as an expression of, and for the purpose of, radiating God’s glory for God’s pleasure.
In these two truths we find our joy, our pleasure, and our contentment, which is in Christ. Here, there is fulfilment in life, and a satisfaction that lifts us above the difficult events and the perplexing pains of life.

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Fear to awe to joy

By / The Pastor's Pen / 3 minutes of reading

Humanly speaking, understanding how fear of God can produce joy is bewildering. Yet, in Christ, that is precisely the result of our relationship with the Saviour. In a prophetic Psalm, David looks forward to Christ who would bridge the chasm between fear of God and joy in His Son. Serve the LORD with fear and celebrate his rule with trembling. Kiss his son, or he will be angry and your way will lead to your destruction, for his wrath can flare up in a moment. Blessed are all who take refuge in him (Psalm 2:11-12 NIV).

These two verses reveal the two sides of fearing God which operate together to produce our awe of Him. And it is our awe of Him that produces our joy, satisfaction, and hope.

Our fear of the Lord begins to grow as we see that the LORD is the true God; he is the living God and the everlasting King. At his wrath the earth quakes, and the nations cannot endure his indignation (Jeremiah 10:10). God is a righteous judge, a God who displays his wrath every day (Psalm 7:11). As we learn more of God’s holiness, we discover that our sin arouses His wrath. We, like Israel, do wicked things, provoking the LORD to anger (2 Kings 17:11). Compared to Yahweh’s ultimate holiness, mankind is found to be severely lacking. In mankind’s natural condition there is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands (God); there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away from God (Romans 3:10-12). Our sin is offensive; therefore, God declares the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). When God awakens us to this reality, we are rightfully terrified of Him because His justice demands hell, and we are powerless to do anything to rectify our situation.

From a negative stance, fear of the Lord begins to rise in our hearts as we acknowledge God’s greatness, His holiness, His wrath, His justice, and His absolute authority over us. This fear becomes the seed of awe. There is a dual awakening taking place within us; God’s majestic greatness and our sinfully helpless minuteness. This is the heart of what David meant when he said, serve the LORD with fear and celebrate his rule with trembling.

But that still leaves us short of awe that produces joy towards God. Again, David prophetically speaks to this. His strange saying, kiss his son, points us to God’s Messiah Son, Jesus Christ. Only Jesus can quench God’s indignation against our sin (1 John 4:10). Only Jesus can turn us from God’s destruction through granting us faith and repentance (Ephesians 2:8-9; 2 Timothy 2:25). This is because only Jesus Christ has suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit (1 Peter 3:18). Only Jesus bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed (1 Peter 2:24). In Christ we are healed of the worst disease of all, the sickness of sin. And here is our joy of appreciation. We take refuge in Jesus Christ where there is forgiveness (Colossians 1:14), and we are so glad that God has made a hiding place for us in His Son.

Awe of God grows out of a healthy fear of taking Him for granted or misrepresenting Him. Awe is maximized when we realise the blessing of God’s grace, because it is so undeserved, yet given so freely in Jesus Christ.

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Trustworthy God – Part 3

By / The Pastor's Pen / 3 minutes of reading

King David was a man acquainted with both the dazzling highs and the darkest lows of life. While some of the painful times resulted from his foolish and sinful behaviour, others were simply the result of life’s complexities forced upon him by providential chance and others.

When hurts repeat often, the heart sometimes recoils into distrust of others, and even of God. Add to this condition the heart’s natural compulsion towards self-deception, it easily finds itself unable to trust God. This is fed also by fears, uncertainty, and the ever-present murmurings of others. The result is, belief begins leaning towards disbelief, trust reverts to distrust, and spiritual paralysis sets in. If we find ourselves in this condition, realise that we don’t need assistance, we need a Saviour.

The nation Israel often sank into this empty spiritual condition where all hope of being reconciled to God seemed lost due to their hard-heartedness. Jeremiah lived in such a time of Israel’s history, yet God spoke through him the comforting words of hope and trust that Israel needed. The Lord’s words tell of His provision for a nation lost in the despair of their faithless lack of trust in Yahweh. I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you. Again I will build you, and you shall be built… (Jeremiah 31:3-4).

Spiritual restoration is based upon God’s faithfulness, with His determination providing every resource necessary for wayward people to exercise faith. Earlier Jeremiah told Israel, blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, whose trust is the LORD (Jeremiah 17:7). This uncommon statement shows that for people inwardly lost, they can reach out to the God who will inwardly become the trust they so desperately need. This is a unique work of God’s Spirit in the human heart, providing what we cannot generate ourselves, trust.

Similarly, David reminds us in Psalm 40:4, blessed is the man who makes the LORD his trust. Just as the Lord provides faith for the faithless (Eph 2:8-9) and repentance for the unrepentant (2Ti 2:25), so He graciously provides trust for the untrusting. This extraordinary work of God is that He becomes within us the actual heart mechanism which reaches out to God in trust. Therefore, when we trust in God, it’s not for a desired outcome, instead it’s that we are satisfied in simply trusting HIM. The result being that we accept His will in whatever format He chooses to express it in our lives. It could be said, that in this way, from within the believer, God is trusting God and we are simply the vessels through which His trust is manifested. This is where the downcast believer discovers the blessing that both Jeremiah and David spoke of, recognising that we can ask God to be the trust we so desperately lack.

Trust is therefore not measured by its size but by our willingness for God to generate deeper trust in Him. The presence of even the most microscope wish for any capacity to trust in God is evidence of the Almighty being active in our lives. Trust is believing with confidence in the certainty of another.

Armed with the truth of God’s Word we know that through Christ His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire (2 Peter 1:3-4).

 

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Trustworthy God – Part 2

By / The Pastor's Pen / 3 minutes of reading

Trust is believing with confidence in the certainty of another. As our relationship with God stands or falls on trust, a clear understanding of trust that can be actioned is critical. Solomon wrote possibly the Bible’s best memorized text on trust in Proverbs 3:5-7. Trust in Yahweh with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the LORD, and turn away from evil.

The precision of Solomon’s exhortation leaves no room for misunderstanding. The focus and destination of our trust is to be Yahweh, the LORD, creator of every human (Jer 1:5). Every person, without exception, is commanded to place their trust in the one true God. There can be no divided loyalties with our trust, it all belongs to the LORD. Which reminds us that trust is volitional, it doesn’t happen by accident or when our feelings are accommodating. Trust in God is the action of our will energised by faith.

The LORD doesn’t seek our trust in competition with others. No, there can be no others sharing our heart’s deepest desire or dependency, they belong to the LORD only. This is why Solomon explains that as we direct trust to the LORD we should take care not to compromise it by depending on our own understanding. This can be a challenge, as we humans often try to assist God, thinking we possess knowledge or wisdom that He doesn’t.

The scope of our trust in God is to be life wide. In every sphere of life, both internal heart matters and external activities, God is to be acknowledged. It’s so easy to get caught in the busyness of life and neglect to observe God’s presence. Likewise, it’s easy to think that the Lord would not be interested in certain aspects of our lives and our fleshly reasoning becomes our dominant thoughts. The fact is, God is interested in every detail of our lives. He is present in every moment of our lives. And He remains patiently loving throughout the entirety of our lives.

The standard of our trust is to be holiness, which is often unconsciously forgotten. It’s easy to get carried along by the flow of work, family, and church life. Somehow along the way we become influenced by worldly compromise and the evils of the world don’t seem to bother us as they once did. If left unchecked, that influence pervades more of our hearts until our personal values lean towards the world’s values. Whereas trust in the LORD grows from a reverent fear of God that recognises sin and turns away from it. This is a discipline of trust which strengthens over time as it is exercised more and more.

The blessings of trust in the LORD should captivate our attention as we realise His affections and the eternal security that exist in Christ. Trust is not a one-time thing. No, it’s an ongoing conscious walk of confident faith with the Almighty. As we watch and pray, we see the LORD invisibly directing us and actively maneuvering within our lives. Through trust, unforeseen and unpleasant events of life can take on a fresh perspective as we witness God’s providential care and provision through those times. 

David was right when he instructed, commit your way to the LORD; trust in him, and he will act (Psalm 37:5). The fact is, God always acts. And those who trust will recognise His active engagement with their lives and give Him the thanks and praise for it.

To be continued…

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