What a Christian is

Na Humble Orthodoxy offers chapters from Mark Dever's What Is a Healthy Church? The first chapter is about the importance of church membership and can be read here as a pdf. An excerpt from the portion provided at the Na site:

....Why do I worry that if you call yourself a Christian but you are not a member in good standing of the local church you attend, you might be going to hell? Think with me for a moment about what a Christian is.

A Christian is someone, who first and foremost, has been forgiven of his sin and been reconciled to God the Father through Jesus Christ. This happens when a person repents of his sins and puts his faith in the perfect life, substitutionary death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

In other words, a Christian is someone who has reached the end of himself and his own moral resources. He has recognized that he, in defiance of God’s plainly revealed law, has given his life over to worshiping and loving things other than God—things like career, family, the stuff money can buy, the opinions of other people, the honor of his family and community, the favor the so-called gods of other religions, the spirits of this world, or even the good things a person can do. He has also recognized that these “idols” are doubly damning masters. Their appetites are never satisfied in this life. And they provoke God’s just wrath over the next life, a death and a judgment the Christian has already tasted a bit of (mercifully) in the world’s miseries.

A Christian, therefore, knows that if he were to die tonight and stand before God, and if God were to say, “Why should I let you into my presence?” the Christian would say, “You shouldn’t let me in. I have sinned and owe you a debt that I cannot pay back.” But he wouldn’t stop there. He would continue, “Yet, because of your great promises and mercy, I depend on the blood of Jesus Christ shed as a substitute for me, paying my moral debt, satisfying your holy and righteous requirements, and removing your wrath against sin!”

Upon that plea to be declared righteous in Christ, the Christian is someone who has discovered the beginning of the freedom from sin’s enslavement. Where the idols and other gods could never be satisfied, their stomachs were never full, God’s satisfaction in the work of Christ means that the person purchased out of condemnation by Christ’s work is now free! For the first time ever, the Christian is free to turn his back on sin, not just to replace it slavishly with another sin but with the Holy Spirit-given desire for Jesus Christ himself and for Christ’s rule in his life. Where Adam tried to push God off the throne and make himself god, the Christian rejoices that Christ is upon the throne. He considers Jesus’ life of perfect submission to the will and words of the father and seeks to be like his savior.

So a Christian is someone who, first of all, has been reconciled to God in Christ. Christ has assuaged the wrath of God, and the Christian is now declared righteous before God, called to a life of righteousness, and lives in the hope of one day appearing before his majesty in heaven.

Yet that’s not all! Second, a Christian is someone who, by virtue of his reconciliation with God, has been reconciled to God’s people. Do you remember the first story in the Bible after Adam and Eve’s fall and banishment from the garden? It’s the story of one human being murdering another—Cain killing Abel. If the act of trying to shove God off the throne is, by its very nature, an act of trying to place ourselves upon it, we’re not about let some other human being take it from us. Not a chance. Adam’s act of breaking fellowship with God resulted in an immediate break in fellowship among all human beings. It’s every man for himself.

It should be no surprise, then, that Jesus said that “all the Law and Prophets hang on these two commandments”: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind and love your neighbor as yourself (see Matt 22:34-40). The two commandments go together. The first produces the second, and the second proves the first.

Through Christ, then, being reconciled to God means being reconciled to everyone else who is reconciled to God. ....

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