Only One Kind

Never, never forget that there is only one kind of Christian. The Lord uses different means to save us. Some of us were very young and cannot remember the time, and some of us were older and we do. But there is only one kind of Christian: the kind that used to be an enemy of God, the kind that once hated God and His mercy and His truth, and set every human bulwark against Him. And then Christ Himself battered that wall down. He smashed our excuses, our ignorance, our rebellion, our hatred by His grace, and He spoke to us directly. He called us by name. He declared our forgiveness authoritatively. He claimed us for His own.

The point is that every true Christian is one whom God has spoken to directly. Yes, it may have been mediated through godly parents, faithful teachers, good friends, reading the Bible, hearing a sermon, or some other experience, but in every case, the means was the vehicle that God Himself arrived in. You were saved by His power, by His authority. It was not natural. There are no Christians by birth. You cannot be a Christian simply because your parents are. You cannot be a Christian simply because you’ve always gone to church. You cannot be a Christian merely because you were baptized as a baby or as an adult. There is only one kind of Christian, the kind who has encountered the Living God. The kind who has known the terror of God’s judgment against our sin and has heard and believed the good news that Jesus Christ died in our place. 

But this means that Christians do not live their lives on the basis of human authority or human tradition or human consensus. It is true that friends and pastors and traditions can be helpful in pointing us to the truth, but it is not the truth because they said it is. There is only one truth: the truth of God in Christ. And this is our basis for resisting all lies, all tyranny, all injustice. We do not speak with the mere lisping of men; we speak with the thunder of God’s Word, a thunder we have heard clearly. And we know that there is no fortress, no black gate, no bulwark of human opinion or fraud or legislation or executive order that can stand before the Word of the Living God. We already tried that, and the walls came tumbling down.

Photo by Micah Williams on Unsplash